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“Oh No” by Ok Go

The ety­mol­ogy of OK was mas­ter­fully explained by the dis­tin­guished Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor Allen Walker Read in a series of arti­cles in the jour­nal Amer­i­can Speech in 1963 and 1964.The let­ters, not to keep you guess­ing, stand for “oll kor­rect.” They’re the result of a fad for com­i­cal abbre­vi­a­tions that flour­ished in the late 1830s and 1840s.

Read but­tressed his argu­ments with hun­dreds of cita­tions from news­pa­pers and other doc­u­ments of the period. As far as I know his work has never been suc­cess­fully challenged.

The abbre­vi­a­tion fad began in Boston in the sum­mer of 1838 and spread to New York and New Orleans in 1839. The Boston news­pa­pers began refer­ring satir­i­cally to the local swells as OFM, “our first men,” and used expres­sions like NG, “no go,” GT, “gone to Texas,” and SP, “small potatoes.”

Many of the abbre­vi­ated expres­sions were exag­ger­ated mis­spellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day. One pre­de­ces­sor of OK was OW, “oll wright,” and there was also KY, “know yuse,” KG, “know go,” and NS, “nuff said.”

Most of these acronyms enjoyed only a brief pop­u­lar­ity. But OK was an excep­tion, no doubt because it came in so handy. It first found its way into print in Boston in March of 1839 and soon became wide­spread among the hip­per element.

It didn’t really enter the lan­guage at large, how­ever, until 1840. That’s when Demo­c­ra­tic sup­port­ers of Mar­tin Van Buren adopted it as the name of their polit­i­cal club, giv­ing OK a dou­ble mean­ing. (“Old Kinder­hook” was a native of Kinder­hook, New York.)

The Straight Dope: What does “OK” stand for?

Over Paris by Arnold Pouteau’s (notice the Eif­fel Tower hid­den in the mist)

This blog might be a tad empty for the next while as I’m head­ing off for an extended vaca­tion. For now, try Boing Boing for some strange and amus­ing articles.