The word “OK.” We all use it. We all say it. We all love the two-letter convenience of the word. But do we know the origin of OK? Do we know what it really means? Well, we’re about to find out, thanks to Allan Metcalf, author of OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word.
In March of 1839, a journalist created OK as a joke, intending it to stand for "Oll Korrect," a purposeful misspelling of ‘All Correct’ that went with the satiric style of his article. Little did he know that he had inadvertently started a trend that is now part of our language over 150 years later. OK made its debut here, but it wouldn’t become popularized until a bit later.
OK entered the political campaign (as a word, not a candidate) in 1840 because of Martin Van Buren. He was running for re-election, and his nickname just happened to be Old Kinderhook (a story for another time). Those initials inspired his group of supporters to call themselves The OK Club. Today, this would suggest mediocrity, which is ironic, given that Van Buren didn’t win the re-election. This coincidence merged the two meanings together, drawing more attention to the catchy “OK”.
The invention of the telegraph around this time made it possible communicate more quickly, so OK turned from a silly joke to a handy, abbreviated phrase. This is probably the stage where it began to develop its many usages. In that time, it was in fashion to create clever acronyms, something we can relate to in today’s world of abbreviation and brevity in social media and communication.
For all you efficiency-hungry and tech-savvy little thumb sprinters out there, here are some other examples of the abbreviations used back in the day. OK was not the only misspelled acronym. KG meant "know go" (no go) and OW meant "oll write" (alright). And people think our generation has poor grammar skills! ISBD stands for "it shall be done," useful as a response for when one’s mother listed the chores for the day and nodding took too much effort. RTBS stands for ‘remains to be seen’, which I imagine is the same as IDK, just fancier. My personal favorite, SP, for "small potatoes," was hopefully similar to NBD, "no big deal," i.e., “Oh, someone stole my pony? Small potatoes. It’s healthier to walk to work anyway.”
Surprisingly, OK has held on to this very day not as a form of slang, but as an accepted word with several meanings and a vast usage all over the English-speaking world. However, feel free to use these other, lesser-known abbreviations that never made it mainstream. You’ll probably just get called a geek, but that’s SP honestly. Maybe we can become a community of acronym hipsters. It RTBS, but I bet ISBD. In the immortal words of author John Green: “OK? OK.” Keep those potatoes small and have a classy day.
