Is "okay" OK?

[level_head]

I actually don't know the answer to that question -- or at least, an answer that can be backed up with citations. But that question (along with the origin and history of "OK") is the subject of the book OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word.

Here's a Q & A on O & K. An excerpt:
Q. Why write a whole book about OK? I mean, it’s just…OK

Comments

[jasolater]

Very interesting!!

[level_head]

The book I'm OK, You're OK (mentioned above) was quite interesting. Its companion book introduced me, decades ago, to the notion of Parent, Adult, and Child parts of the psyche, and how they are activated by events. It is no more scientific than Freud's hypothesized (and later abandoned) notion of "anal" and other phases of growing children -- but the Parent/Adult/Child aspect certainly seemed to fit with the behavior of people I encountered. It caused me to rethink my own interactions with people, and I made changes that I still operate by more than four decades later, to try to avoid "hooking the child" of someone I'm dealing with. Whether a manager who worked for me, a low-level employee, a waitress or a client, all of these folks were deserving of respect. And now I had a sort of mechanical sense of how best to express that respect.

You've seen, here, that I am not easily provoked. That was not true half a century ago; the change was quite intentional and the book mentioned above was part of it.

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[polaris93]

Yes, it does. A word that ubiquitous and influential surely deserves such recognition. :-)

[acelightning]

I know of the "oll korrekt", "Old Kinderhook", and Choctaw explanations for the origin of "OK/okay", but none of them seems very plausible. Instead, it has always been obvious to me that it's the Scottish/Irish phrase "och aye" (which literally means "oh yes" - a reasonable equivalent to the primary meaning of "okay"), deprived of its lilt and its guttural /ch/ by a prairie-flat American accent. Yet I've never read about that as a proposed origin.

[level_head]

At the lower link, they nail the origin of OK down to the date, and place.

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[acelightning]

I don't see any proof. I see an author asserting (without footnotes or other references) that another author has claimed to know the origin of the expression with certainty.

The Wikipedia article on "Okay" states the "oll korekt" theory, both as a deliberately humorous misspelling and as an actual illiteracy. The article also includes "Old Kinderhook" and "Old Kentucky", similar words in Choctaw and Wolof (I'd forgotten the latter)... and the "och aye" theory as well.

[c_eagle]

Extraordinarily fun trivia!

[deckardcanine]

Huh. I thought the "oll korrekt" thing was military code. It would explain how other countries caught onto it.

I think "OK" deserves a chapter, but even I, a word geek, would probably get bored with a whole book on it. Then again, sufficiently great writing can make anything interesting.