OK. Wait, Where Does OK Even Come From?
What ties Martin Van Buren, the Greeks, Bostonians, Choctaw people and Kinderhook together? OK!
Across the world, there is now a word that binds most languages together, whether you speak Vietnamese, French, Russian, Hebrew or Arabic. It is the most basic the English language gets, the most spoken word on the planet and the word used to agree on pretty much everything. Ok.
Written strangely and sounding alien, it is no surprise that it remains not fully known where the word comes from. Hopefully, in this article, you’ll get a hypothesis on where it all started.
The first and the most widely accepted argument was developed by linguist Allen Walker Read, who in 1964 started exploring old American newspapers and documents in a quest to find the root of the word.
His conclusion… In the 1830s, there was a language fad raging across the USA of ‘comical misspellings’ and using acronyms to shorten words. More precisely, he argued, ‘in the summer of 1838’ people started using bizarre acronyms for many phrases including SP (meaning ‘small potatoes’), GT (‘gone to Texas’) and OK’s ancestor, OW (‘oll wright’). The last word may sound strange, more British Cockney than American. This is because it was at this time that the Bostonian accent, which is so distinguished, attempted to emulate the European British accent, so ‘r’s were taken out of words or placed elsewhere. It was around this time that ‘OK’ (‘oll Korrect’) was born, but it remained a largely secondary word, seemingly a fad like the rest of them.
But it really was the 1840 US presidential election that ensured the word would have its place in history.
Martin Van Buren, the Democratic candidate of that year, and his supporters started claiming the word stood for ‘Old Kinderhook’. With Kinderhook being the place of origin of Van Buren, and the election slogan ‘Vote for OK’ sounding better than his Dutch name, its use became widespread. Then on top of that, his Whig opponents started to make fun of the word, claiming it came from Andrew Jackson’s bad spelling of ‘All correct’ (‘oll korrect’).
But then there are other even more varied claims to the word.
For example, folk singer Pete Seeger sang that OK was of Choctaw origin, whilst earlier on, Christian missionary Cyrus Babington also added strength to this claim. It could be that it was the Americans who loaned the word from this Native American tribe, whose language was one of the most spoken at the time and with widespread contact with African-American slaves.
Other proposed origins include the idea that it was borrowed from the Greek phrase όλα καλά (óla kalá), which means “all good”. That one, to me at least, seems a bit of a stretch. Others say it comes from Ulster Scots and the Scottish. This seems more credible; many Americans have Scottish ancestors who, when they migrated, brought the phrase ‘och aye’ (‘oh yes’).
Well, this article hopefully illustrates how such a common word can provide fiery debates in the world of linguistics. To me, it equally seems to show how all languages have universal pieces of speech which we can all share (I mean, now you know that even the Scots, Greeks and Native Americans all share a word in common).
Now that you’ve heard the arguments of the linguists, which one do you think seems the most convincing?
