How about a post about something other than our trips or Adelyn?!?! Many of you know that I majored in Linguistics at BYU. While there I bought this book about the origin of certain words and never really read it. Well I was flipping through it this morning (after putting it the bathroom for some potentially dull moments) and came across "OK." Since I have heard the word OK in every country I have travelled to, I got curious. And just in case you all are curious, I thought I would share the entry.
America's greatest contribution to the English language and indeed to languages all over the world is a joke. Or at least that's how it began. In the summer of 1838 newspaper columnists in Boston thought nothing funnier than to reduce a phrase to its initials (with an explanation in parentheses). To add to the humor, columnists sometimes misspelled the abbreviations. One 1838 example was O.W., meaning "all right," with blatant misspellings of both initial letters. That set the stage for an even more outrageous misspelling in March 1839: O.K. translated as "all correct." The joke was that neither O nor K was correct.
O.K. might have died out if "Old Kinderhook," President Martin Van Buren (born in Kinderhook, New York), hadn't been running for reelection in 1840. "O.K. clubs" supporting him were established throughout the country. Old Kinderhook lost, but O.K. won a permanent place in American English. Until about 1900, however, O.K. remained obscure. But the twentieth century turned out to be an OK century, perhaps encouraged by scholarly President Woodrow Wilson's use of "okeh" on official documents. (He spelled it "okeh" because he mistakenly thought it came from the Choctaw Indian language.)
So there you have it! Then I got online and did a little more research and it turns out that Ok's origin is actually still debated by scholars. Crazy. Could it be America's greatest contribution to worldwide linguistics?? It's certainly a popular one. The Chinese use it (in Chinese) all the time. Have you heard it in other countries where you have been?
3 comments:
It is used frequently in most Spanish-speaking countries as well as Thailand. Come to think of it, I can't recall a single country I've been to that hasn't used it!
How fascinating! Dave also graduated in Linguistics and has a few funny books like that. And yes, I heard the Chinese say o.k. repeatedly!!! That's funny that it's origin is in the U.S. and relatively not that long ago and yet it's spread everywhere!
I wouldn't know I've pretty much been around middle to upperclass white people my whole life until I met Greg who speaks English as a second language but doesn't know another language besides improper english/slang!
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