WHY WE SAY "OK"

WHY WE SAY "OK”

There’s a -letter phrase we listen to everywhere.

OK.

Okay.

“OK, are you OK Annie?”

“OK ladies…”

OK is probably the most recognizable phrase on the planet.

It’s crucial to how we communicate with every different, or even with our technology. “Alexa, turn off the residing room light.”

“OK”.

You in all likelihood use it each day – even if you don’t word it.

But, what does OK truly suggest? And in which did it come from?

“Hm. OK.”

“Okay then.”

“OK, thank you.”

OK clearly traces again to an 1830s fad of intentionally misspelling abbreviations. Young “intellectual” sorts in Boston overjoyed the ones “within the recognize” with butchered coded messages consisting of KC, or “knuff ced”, KY, “know yuse,” and OW, “oll wright.” Haha.

But way to more than one lucky breaks, one abbreviation rose above the rest: OK, or “oll korrect.”

In the early 1800s, “all correct” was a common word used to affirm that the whole lot changed into so as. Its abbreviated cousin started going mainstream on March 23, 1839, while OK turned into first posted in the Boston Morning Post.

Soon different papers picked up on the comic story and spread it around the united states, till OK turned into something everybody knew approximately, not only some Boston insiders.

And OK’s newfound popularity even precipitated a flailing US president from Kinderhook, New York, to adopt it as a nickname at some stage in his 1840 reelection marketing campaign. Van Buren’s supporters fashioned OK Clubs all over the U.S.A., and their message became pretty clean:

Old Kinderhook changed into “oll korrect.”

The campaign was tremendously publicized and grew to become quite nasty in the press. His opponents ended up turning the abbreviation around on him, saying it stood for “Orful Konspiracy” or “Orful Katastrophe”.

Hah.

In the quit, even a clever nickname didn’t store Van Buren’s presidency.

But it was a win for OK.

That 1840 presidential marketing campaign firmly mounted OK within the American vernacular. And at the same time as comparable abbreviations fell out of fashion, OK made the crossover from slang into valid, purposeful use way to one invention:

the telegraph.

If we decrease the bridge, the present-day flows to the sounder.

At the alternative ceases, the modern-day energizes an electromagnet and this attracts the armature.

The armature clicks down towards a screw and taps out a message.

The telegraph debuted in 1844, simply five years after OK. It transmitted brief messages in the form of electric pulses, with mixtures of dots and dashes representing letters of the alphabet.

This becomes OK’s moment to polish.

The two letters have been easy to tap out and really not likely to be harassed with something else.

It was fast followed as a standard acknowledgment of a transmission received, especially via operators on the expanding US railroad.

This telegraphic manual from 1865 even goes as some distance as to say that

“no message is ever regarded as transmitted until the office receiving it gives O K.”

OK had ended up severe business.

But there’s some other huge reason the two letters stuck around, and it’s no longer simply due to the fact they’re smooth to talk.

It has to do with how OK appears.

Or greater in particular, how the letter K appears and sounds.

It’s virtually unusual to begin a phrase with the letter K in English — it’s ranked around 22nd inside the alphabet.

That rarity spurred a “Kraze for K” at the turn of the century in marketing and print, wherein corporations changed hard Cs with Ks so that it will Katch your eye.

The concept turned into that editing of a word — like Klearflax Linen Rugs or this Kook-Rite Stove, for example — could draw more interest to it. And that’s still a visible approach: We see K represented in contemporary company emblems, like

Krispy-Kreme and Kool-Aid.

It’s the K that makes it so memorable.

By the 1890s, OK’s Bostonian origins have been already in the main forgotten, and newspapers began to discuss its history — frequently perpetuating myths in the system that some human beings nevertheless believe. Like the declaration that it comes from the Choctaw word ‘okeh,’ which means ‘so it's far.’ Choctaw gave us the phrase OK… OK’s beginnings had grown to be difficult to understand but it didn’t truly be counted anymore — the word turned into embedded in our language.

Today, we use it because of the ultimate “impartial affirmative.”

“OK then.”

“Okay then.”

“Learn to definitely love yourself. OK?”

“OK.”

“Get yourself up right here!”

“OK!”

“I don’t recognize what to say.”

“Say OK.”

“OK. It’s settled then!”

Allan Metcalf wrote the definitive history of OK, and he explains that the word “affirms without comparing,” meaning it doesn’t bring any feelings — it just acknowledges and accepts facts. If you “got domestic OK,” it just way you were unharmed. If your “food became OK,” then it turned into applicable. And “OK” confirms an alternate of plans. It is kind of a reflex at this factor — we don’t even preserve song of ways a great deal we use it.

This is probably why OK became arguably the first word spoken while people landed on the moon.

Not terrible for a corny comic story from the 1830s.

Alright men, reduce it out.