OK. WHY THIS BOOK? STRANGELY ENOUGH, EVEN THOUGH OK is by far the most successful American creation in language, as well as nearly the strangest, it hasn’t had a book of its own. So here it is.
And it is made possible, above all, by Allen Walker Read (1906–2002), professor at Columbia University, scholar without equal of American English. Before he came along, a century of speculation, obfuscation, and deliberate deception had obscured the origin of OK seemingly beyond recovery. In the absence of any clear evidence and the presence of false rumors, learned lexicographers as well as ordinary citizens were free to imagine the beginnings of OK in sources as disparate as the Choctaw Indian language, Otto Kimmel’s biscuits, and supposed misspelling by President Andrew Jackson. All plausible, in their way, but as Read would demonstrate, O.R. (all wrong).
His name was apt, because Read read voluminously in the books, magazines, and newspapers of early America. He did this as a staff member of the four-volume scholarly Dictionary of American English (1938–44) but also on his own throughout his life. So it was not surprising that Read was the one who discovered, in fine print on page 2 of the Boston Morning Post of March 23, 1839, an instance of OK that turned out to be the earliest on record. Nobody else but Read would have been combing through that newspaper looking for words, and nobody else but Read had read widely enough in the newspapers of that day to be sure that this was the first instance.
When he published his findings in a series of articles in the journal American Speech back in 1963–64, he didn’t offer just that one citation. To prove his point beyond dispute, he provided literally hundreds of quotations from newspapers of the 1830s and 1840s, showing not only the context of joking abbreviations and misspelling that made OK possible in the first place but also the growth and development of OK as it was adapted in the presidential election of 1840 for “Old Kinderhook,” Martin Van Buren, and for many subsequent purposes.
Since the publication of his articles, there have been occasional challenges to Read’s evidence of the origin of OK in that Boston newspaper. All have failed to earn support, however, because they rest either entirely on speculation or on isolated instances of something written earlier. As for speculation, it’s easy to find native expressions in other languages that sound like OK—that’s one reason why the American OK has spread so widely through the languages of the world. But speculation needs evidence to back it, and so far none has been found. As for the earlier isolated instances, some have turned out to be misreadings, while others—well, there’s not a shred of evidence showing that one night’s watchword from the American Revolution was somehow connected with a Boston joke half a century later.
My chapters on the first few years of OK necessarily lean heavily on Read’s evidence. Those who have seen his articles in American Speech or their reprint in his Milestones in the History of English in America (edited by Richard W. Bailey, Publication of the American Dialect Society 86, Duke University Press, 2002) will recognize much that is familiar here. The additional matter in my chapters only further confirms his conclusions.
In the half century since Read’s articles, much more has been discovered about the later life of OK as it developed from joke to business tool and then to staple of everyday conversation and an attitude toward life. A wealth of new material is available, unimaginable in the paper world of fifty years ago. Internet, take a bow.
I have tried to be as generous as Read in providing examples to illustrate the development of OK. The vast majority of examples come from the Internet, many of them in historical document databases such as Making of America, a digital collection of nineteenth-century newspapers, magazines, and books. Mining the data for examples of OK is still hard work; there is much fool’s gold in the false positives dredged up from old publications by automatic OCR. Nevertheless, searching the Internet for OK locates many needles in acres of haystacks, allowing for a fulllength portrait that begins to do justice to this incomparable expression.
You won’t find footnotes in this book. The Internet changes too fast for that. Instead, I have tried to acknowledge sources in sufficient detail that you can locate them too by Googling, with a little luck. In those places in my book I have named the numerous people who, wittingly or un-, have contributed to this portrait of OK.
But in addition, let me here note my gratitude for help in ways beyond those noted in the text from researchers Erin McKean, Richard W. Bailey, Barry Popik, Joseph Pickett, and James Davis; at MacMurray College from Colleen Hester, Alice Dodson, Malea Harney, Linda Duncan, Nadine Szczepanski, Dan Currier, Susan Eilering, and DeeAnn Roome; and elsewhere from Fr. Kip Ashmore, Sara Metcalf, Ginger Lane, Elizabeth Schneewind, Jennifer Choi, and Louise DeCosta Wides. At Oxford University Press I had essential assistance from Peter Ohlin, Brian Hurley, Lucy Randall, Woody Gilmartin, Joellyn Ausanka, and Betsy DeJesu. And I must reserve my last word of thanks for my wife, Donna, who is way beyond OK.
OK? Let’s begin.