THE HUMOR OF OK, ITS POLITICAL RELEVANCE, AND ITS everyday use in commerce and clubs might portend its widespread use in literature of the later part of the nineteenth century. Such, strangely enough, is not the case. The great American authors of the later nineteenth century, and the near-great, have one thing in common: They all avoid OK.
You will search in vain for OK in the pages of Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, and Holmes. Perhaps that’s not too surprising; although all of them lived at least a decade after OK was invented, all were born before 1809 and would have been in their thirties before they first had the opportunity to learn of it.
Younger, in their twenties in 1839 at the time of the birth of OK, were Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Richard Henry Dana, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, James Russell Lowell, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. Still no OKs, though these include the authors of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Song of Myself, works that easily might have included OK.
(Edward Everett Hale, a once influential author born in 1822, might be considered an exception because of his use of OK in “The Brick Moon,” published in 1870–71 and discussed here in Chapter 7. But in that story OK is strictly limited to a long-distance means of communication, not employed in conversation or narrative.)
Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Horatio Alger, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Henry Adams were born in the 1830s and would have had the opportunity to encounter OK from their childhood. Nevertheless, they avoided OK. It doesn’t appear even in the dialect humor of Twain and Harte.
Born later than OK were Ambrose Bierce, Joel Chandler Harris, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Whitcomb Riley, Kate Chopin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair—the list goes on and on. It is possible that an occasional OK lurks on an obscure page by one of those writers, but it is unquestionable that OK is about as plentiful in their writing as hens’ teeth.
There are two qualifications to that statement that only serve to confirm the deliberate avoidance of OK by literary writers. Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott both have single instances of OK—and both were removed in revision.
Thoreau was the first. In 1850 he wrote in his journal,
When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say: it surpasses her credulity. Properly speaking, my style is as fashionable as theirs. “They do not make them so now,” as if she quoted the Fates! I am for a moment absorbed in thought, thinking, wondering who they are, where they live. It is some Oak Hall, O call, O.K., all correct establishment which she knows but I do not. Oliver Cromwell. I emphasize and in imagination italicize each word separately of that sentence to come at the meaning of it.
Oak Hall was a “clothier’s establishment,” to use a phrase current then, and Thoreau is at his most playful as he turns the name into OK. But apparently he considered it too irrelevant, too distracting from his message to allow in print. The passage from the journal appears in Walden, published in 1854, with considerable revision:
When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “they”—“It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.”
Thoreau was hardly a man to insist on gentility, or to avoid playing with language, but evidently he thought OK unsuited to his purpose.
The other exception—and subsequent omission—comes in the hugely successful and still well-known novel Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. If there were an annual prize for literary use of OK, in 1869 it would have been hers by default. It isn’t absolutely the first literary instance of OK, but it’s surprisingly modern, including the spelling okay. In fact, it is the first known instance of that four-letter spelling.
Little Women is the story of the spirited March sisters of Concord, Massachusetts. The most refined and artistic of the four sisters is Amy, who uses the more refined spelling okay in a letter from Heidelberg, Germany, to her mother in Massachusetts while on a tour of Europe with her aunt, uncle, and cousin. Amy explains why she’ll be ready to accept the English gentleman Fred Vaughn’s proposal of marriage if it comes:
I’ve made up my mind, and if Fred asks me, I shall accept him, though I’m not madly in love. I like him, and we get on comfortably together. He is handsome, young, clever enough, and very rich—ever so much richer than the Laurences.…
I may be mercenary, but I hate poverty, and don’t mean to bear it a minute longer than I can help. One of us must marry well. Meg didn’t, Jo won’t, Beth can’t yet, so I shall, and make everything okay all round. I wouldn’t marry a man I hated or despised. You may be sure of that, and though Fred is not my model hero, he does very well, and in time I should get fond enough of him if he was very fond of me, and let me do just as I liked. So I’ve been turning the matter over in my mind the last week, for it was impossible to help seeing that Fred liked me.…
Of course this is all very private, but I wished you to know what was going on. Don’t be anxious about me, remember I am your “prudent Amy,” and be sure I will do nothing rashly. Send me as much advice as you like. I’ll use it if I can. I wish I could see you for a good talk, Marmee. Love and trust me.
This passage comes in the second volume of Little Women, which Alcott wrote rapidly, early in 1869, in response to the commercial success of the first volume, published the year before. It is likely that she put okay in Amy’s letter without giving it a second thought. Alcott’s characters are not above using slang and colloquialisms.
Little Women was revised and refined for an 1880 edition. It’s not clear whether Alcott or her publisher made the changes, but they made the book noticeably more prim and proper, removing slang and regionalisms. Here is the central part of the passage involving okay in its 1880 version:
… One of us must marry well; Meg didn’t, Jo won’t, Beth can’t yet, so I shall, and make everything cozy all round. I wouldn’t marry a man I hated or despised. You may be sure of that, and, though Fred is not my model hero, he does very well, and, in time, I should get fond enough of him if he was very fond of me, and let me do just as I liked. So I’ve been turning the matter over in my mind the last week, for it was impossible to help seeing that Fred liked me.…
The editing adds a sprinkling of commas throughout the passage but makes only one change in vocabulary: cozy for okay. So much for what a fashionable young woman might actually have said or written to her mother.
Amy says earlier to her sisters: “You laugh at me when I say I want to be a lady, but I mean a true gentlewoman in mind and manners, and I try to do it as far as I know how. I can’t explain exactly, but I want to be above the little meannesses and follies and faults that spoil so many women.” Perhaps it is the mark of a gentlewoman to use the spelling okay rather than the more obtrusive OK. Incidentally, at the end, Amy doesn’t take up with Fred after all, but rather marries the Little Women’s childhood friend Laurie.
Clues about the attitude toward OK among nineteenth-century polite company may be found in The Ladies’ Repository, a monthly “devoted to literature, arts, and religion.” An 1874 article on Americanisms quotes a “bilious Englishman”: “certain common vulgarisms he regards as canonical and universal; for instance, ‘O. K.’” Two years later, Rev. J. W. M’Cormick remarks in an article called “Talkers and Talking”:
In the slang dialect every thing is exaggerated. It never rains but it pours. Nothing is simply nice or desirable. It is “awful nice” or “O. K.” or “bully.”
Vulgarism, slang … not quite suited to a young lady of fashion, perhaps.
But OK is not totally absent from fiction of the nineteenth century, if we look far enough. When OK does appear in the writing of lesser-known authors, it is mostly in dialogue by lower-class or rustic characters, indicating that it was recognized as slang, and that, outside of business uses, it belonged to spoken rather than written discourse. Perhaps the spelling OK for all correct implied its use by illiterates. To follow OK through nineteenth-century literature is to take a romp in the backwoods.
Neither low class nor illiteracy would have prevented its use by Mark Twain, for example in the character of Huckleberry Finn, or by Bret Harte, but maybe for them too it was just too dumb a joke.
If they avoided OK, it couldn’t have been for being obscene or blasphemous, because by no stretch of the imagination does OK belong to either of those categories. It must have been simply that they considered OK beneath notice. It wasn’t very exciting, or picturesque, or emphatic. Run-of-the-mill writers put OK in the mouths of ignorant rustic stock characters; better writers found better, more colorful words.
There’s a Comedy of Fashion, first performed in New York City in 1845, featuring an ignorant would-be snob, Mr. Snobson, who can’t understand the bungled French of Mrs. Tiffany:
Mrs. Tiffany. (pointing to a chair with great dignity) Sassoyez vow, Monsur Snobson.
Snobson. I wonder what she’s driving at? I aint up to the fashionable lingo yet! (aside) Eh? what? Speak a little louder, Marm?
Mrs. Tiffany. What ignorance! (aside)
Mr. Tiffany. I presume Mrs. Tiffany means that you are to take a seat.
Snobson. Ex-actly—very obliging of her—so I will. (sits) No ceremony amonst friends, you know—and likely to be nearer—you understand? O. K., all correct. How is Seraphina?
Mrs. Tiffany. Miss Tiffany is not visible this morning.
In 1858 The Reformed Gambler, “the history of the later years of the life of Jonathan H. Green the Reformed Gambler,” tells of a steamboat on the Ohio River that took aboard from the “sucker state,” Illinois, “a party of men who bade fair, from appearance, to be a party not only susceptible of being fleeced, but one that would pay for the pains.” The boat’s clerk questions their captain’s request to be registered under a false name.
“Oh, all is O.K.!” replied the sucker captain, placing his fingers upon his nose. “I am a captain at present. Did you not see my men? Have I not paid their passages for the deck? That’s all!”—finishing the sentence by a request for the clerk, Roberts, and Captain Harris to keep “dark.”
There is The Arkansas Traveller’s Songster : “Containing the celebrated story of the Arkansas traveler, with the music for violin or piano. And also an extensive and choice collection of new and popular comic and sentimental songs,” published in New York City during the Civil War. The songs include a parody on “Mother, I’ve Come Home to Die,” “an original conglomeration of titles,” with the chorus:
“Call me pet names,” “Annie Lisle,”
“A bully boy with a glass eye”;
“Oh, let her rip! she’s all O. K.”—
“Dear mother, I’ve come home to die.”
Unfortunately, the source of the quotation in the third line remains elusive.
We can find another OK in The Book of Humour, Wit and Wisdom, published in Boston in 1874. Here is the complete story of “A Thoughtful Husband”:
The following story is told:—“I say, Cap’n!” cried a little keen-eyed man, as he landed from a steamer at Natchez, “I say, Cap’n, these here aren’t all. I have left somethin’ on board, that’s a fact.” “Them’s all the plunder you brought on board, anyhow,” answered the captain. “Wal, I see now; I grant it’s O.K. accordin’ to list; four boxes, three chests, two band-boxes, and portmanty; two hams, one part-cut, three ropes of inyens, and a tea-kettle. But see, Cap’n, I’m dubersome; I feel there’s somethin’ short, tho’ I’ve counted um nine times over, and never took my eyes off um while on board; there’s somethin’ not right, somehow.” “Wal, stranger, time’s up; thems all I knows on; so just fetch your wife and five children out of the cabin, cos I’m off.” “Thems um! Darn it, thems um! I know’d I’d forgot somethin’!”
In 1874 Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master. A Story of Today was published in New York City. An abusive husband has this conversation with his intimidated wife when he stumbles into his house at five in the morning:
“Has every thing gone right, John?” she asked.
“Yes, of course, the Judge is elected by a big majority. It’s been hard work; but it’s all O. K. now.”
“I didn’t mean that; but—but,” looking at him with an awful horror in her questioning eyes—“was there any row? any body hurt?”
The man drew his black brows together and turned on her fiercely.
In works of fiction, the vocabulary of rustic denizens of the Wild West at least now and then included OK. “A Singular Case,” a story of a search for a mine in the West published in 1883 in The Living Age, features extensive dialogue in dialect by old-timer Bill.
“Nary time,” replied Bill, “an’ thet’s the curos part o’ it—not so curos neither, wen ye think it over. This yer Burnfield must ha’ gone inter the Smoky Hill in ’57 at least. At thet time—but, demme, I allus git confused like wen I think back so fur—anyhow, I know Granite hedn’t no more’n six or eight houses then; an’ men wur all-fired skerce yer them days, an’ often came an’ went without tellin’ whur they come from or whur they was goin’. It wurn’t healthy to be too inquisitive, an’ ax too many questions. It wur like thet wen I first remember Granite, an’ thet wur—ah—nigh onto fourteen year ago. Nobody axed me whur I come from; mebbe I didn’t know—an’ I’m certing I didn’t care.”
This led later to:
“Wal,” said Bill, with considerable satisfaction, “that fixes us all O.K.”
In the 1890s, a number of stories in Overland Monthly included rustic characters whose vocabulary included OK. Readers of “A Night Ride in Apache Land” by W. R. Rowe in an 1892 issue were treated to this dialogue:
“Be sure and cinch ’em well, boys—we can’t stop to tighten ’em after we git started.”
“Ay, ay, yer kin bet on us, Jack.”
“Are yer all O. K.?”
“You bet.”
“Then head fer the Baldy Mountain an’ if ever you spurred, spur this night.”
In 1895 another Overland Monthly story, “Tim Slather’s Ride,” by Granville P. Hurst, has this comment on the eponymous hero by a “Mizzoorah” farmer:
“Mighty nice young fellow,” said farmer Hawley to his daughter, Bessie. “Gads about too much, an’ don’t seem to take natchelly to farm work. But I guess he’ll settle down stiddy when he gits married. ’Taint every young man as has sich prospects as him. Ole man Slathers’ll make ’im partner, if he’ll go to work an’ quit runnin’ ’round to every blame place whur he has a chance o’ showin’ off his ridin’. Tim’s all O. K. An’, Bessie,” added Mr. Hawley, lowering his voice and speaking slowly, as if in doubt just how, or how far, to proceed, “I sometimes kinder wish—’at you—an’ him”—and overcome with the ardor or magnitude of his wish, Mr. Hawley stuck fast on the words and came to a full stop.
In 1899, “Sweet Evalina” by Elwyn Irving Hoffman in Overland Monthly features a rustic bachelor farmer and storyteller who recalls his long-ago sweetheart, assuring his educated interlocutor that he doesn’t mind telling about it:
Clark laughed reassuringly. “O, that’s all O K,” he said; “it happened a long time ago, an’ don’t hurt me none now. A feller gits over things like that, you know, an’ I’d jest as soon tell you about her as not; only, there ain’t nothin’ to tell.”
In “How the Overalls Won: A Football Tale” by Carroll Carrington in a 1900 issue of the Overland Monthly, the cultivated narrator, an easterner, puts on a “drawl” in a mining camp, and “I was easily accepted for the ignoramus I wished them to think me.”
Driscol finally cleared his throat.
“Do you mean to say, you idiot, that you’re going to bring a foot-ball team up here tomorrow?” he demanded, indignantly.
“To-morrer,” I repeated affably. “Yep. Couldn’t get ’em here any sooner. Anyhow we couldn’t play on Sunday, and I didn’t get a chanst to tell the boys about you folks bein’ up here practicin’ until only a couple o’ days or so ago. But they’ll get here tomorrer all right, O. K., without fail, sure pop. Don’t you worry.”
At a somewhat higher literary level, Hamlin Garland, a regional writer of the Midwest and West still held in some esteem nowadays, doesn’t entirely shun OK in the narrative of his adventures in the Klondike gold rush, The Trail of the Goldseekers, published in 1899. Toward the end of the book he is returning to his Wisconsin home by train, solicitous of his beloved horse Ladrone, who is traveling by another train.
Leaving him a tub of water, I bade him good-by once more and started him for Helena, five hundred miles away.
At Missoula, the following evening, I rushed into the ticket office and shouted, “Where is ‘54’?”
The clerk knew me and smilingly extended his hand.
“How de do? She has just pulled out. The horse is all O K. We gave him fresh water and feed.”
So OK continued in that manner throughout the nineteenth century, known to writers and used by them occasionally, but not often, in dialogue involving pretentious, lowlife, or rustic characters. But as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, OK took a turn too. It was a subtle turn, because it still involved unsophisticated characters, but OK in its quiet way began to take on a role in humor and satire. This wasn’t new for OK; after all, it began as a joke, and for much of the nineteenth century it inspired humorous interpretations of the initials OK. But this time it was different. OK took on a secondary role, moving to the background as a natural accompaniment to the humor rather than the focus of it. We see this in three early twentieth-century writers: George Ade, Ring Lardner, and Sinclair Lewis. Perhaps it is no coincidence that all were from the Midwest rather than the East Coast.
George Ade was from Indiana and had his first success writing for Chicago newspapers. He was noted for incorporating smart everyday slang in his stories, and that included OK.
Ade helped make OK cool. Until Ade came along, OK was the language of the uncouth, but his satirical Fables in Slang series includes OK in the vocabulary of a knowing narrator. From More Fables (1900), his second collection, OK appears in “The Fable of the Regular Customer and the Copper-Lined Entertainer,” about a Country Customer who is wined and dined past remembrance by a designated employee of a wholesale concern, thereby ensuring the customer’s business:
The Head of the Concern put his O.K. on a Voucher for $43.60, and it occurred to him that Stereopticon Lectures seemed to be Advancing, but he asked no Questions.
Several more OKs found their way into Ade’s next collection of modern fables, People You Know (1903). This is from “The Search for the Right House and How Mrs. Jump Had Her Annual Attack”:
Mother was looking for a House that had twice as many Closets as Rooms and a Southern Exposure on all four sides.
She had conned herself into the Belief that some day she would run down a Queen Anne Shack that would be O.K. in all Particulars.
Also from People You Know, “The Summer Vacation That Was Too Good to Last”:
It was a lovely Time-Table that he had mapped out. He submitted it to Pet before she went away and she put her O.K. on it, even though her Heart ached for him.
Ade’s 1904 fable “The Night-Watch and the Would-be Something Awful,” about “a full-sized Girl named Florine whose Folks kept close Tab on her,” ends with an OK moral:
Florine would have remained a Dead Card if she had not gone on a Visit to a neighboring City where she bumped into the Town Trifler. He had a Way of proposing to every Girl the first time he met her. It always seemed to him such a cordial Send-Off for a budding Friendship. Usually the Girl asked for Time and then the two of them would Fiddle around and Fuss and Make Up and finally send back all the Letters and that would be the Finish. Florine fooled the foxy Philander. The Moment he came at her with the Marriage Talk she took a firm Hold and said, “You’re on! Get your License to-morrow morning. Then cut all the Telegraph Wires and burn the Railroad Bridges.”
They were Married, and, strange as it may appear, Mother immediately resigned her Job as Policeman and said: “Thank goodness, I’ve got you Married Off! Now you can do as you please.”
When Florine found that she could do as she pleased she discovered that there wasn’t very much of anything to do except Settle Down. After about seven Chafing-Dish Parties she expended her whole Stock of pent-up Ginger and now she is just as Quiet as the rest of us.
MORAL: Any System is O.K. if it finally Works Out.
What Ade did for OK was significant, but it pales in comparison with the contribution of Ring Lardner, another newspaperman and humorist from Chicago. He adopted the persona of a naive, self-important, semiliterate baseball player, a pitcher who is signed by the Chicago White Sox and who writes to a friend back home about big-league baseball. The serialized columns were collected in You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters Home, published in 1916. The letters abound with OK, some forty-two instances according to Google Books. Here the fictional Jack Keefe tells of negotiating a contract with the (real) White Sox owner, Charles Comiskey:
We kidded each other back and forth like that a while and then he says You better go out and get the air and come back when you feel better. I says I feel O.K. now and I want to sign a contract because I have got to get back to Bedford.
Later, Jack ponders a marital problem, using four OKs:
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, JANUERY 31.
Al : Allen is going to take Marie with him on the training trip to California and of course Florrie [Jack’s new wife] has been at me to take her along. I told her postivly that she can’t go. I can’t afford no stunt like that but still I am up against it to know what to do with her while we are on the trip because Marie won’t be here to stay with her. I don’t like to leave her here all alone but they is nothing to it Al I can’t afford to take her along. She says I don’t see why you can’t take me if Allen takes Marie. And I says That stuff is all O.K. for Allen because him and Marie has been grafting off of us all winter. And then she gets mad and tells me I should not ought to say her sister was no grafter. I did not mean nothing like that Al but you don’t never know when a woman is going to take offense. If our furniture was down in Bedford everything would be all O.K. because I could leave her there and I would feel all O.K. because I would know that you and Bertha would see that she was getting along O.K. But they would not be no sense in sending her down to a house that has not no furniture in it. I wish I knowed somewheres where she could visit Al. I would be willing to pay her bord even.
WELL AL ENOUGH FOR THIS TIME.
YOUR OLD PAL, JACK.
Lardner’s famous 1915 short story “Alibi Ike,” about another baseball player who “never pulled a play, good or bad, on or off the field, without apologizin’ for it,” includes more examples:
“You got a swell girl, Ike,” I says.
“She’s a peach,” says Smitty.
“Well, I guess she’s O. K.,” says Ike. “I don’t know much about girls.”
“Didn’t you never run round with ’em?” I says.
“Oh, yes, plenty of ’em,” says Ike. “But I never seen none I’d fall for.”
“That is, till you seen this one,” says Carey.
“Well,” says Ike, “this one’s O. K., but I wasn’t thinkin’ about gettin’ married yet a wile.”
Lardner’s 1920 novel The Big Town is about a couple from South Bend, Indiana, who inherit money and move to New York City with the wife’s sister. The wife looks for an apartment, and the husband, who is the narrator, comments:
Well, they showed me over the whole joint and it did look O.K., but not $4,000 worth. The best thing in the place was a half full bottle of rye in the kitchen that the cripple hadn’t gone south with. I did.
A famous aviator invites him to take a ride:
Well, the four of us set there and talked about this and that, and Codd said he hadn’t had time to get his machine put together yet, but when he had her fixed and tested her a few times he would take me up for a ride.
“You got the wrong number,” I says. “I don’t feel flighty.”
“Oh, I’d just love it!” said Kate.
“Well,” says Codd, “you ain’t barred. But I don’t want to have no passengers along till I’m sure she’s working O.K.”
The language is pointedly nonstandard, but here and elsewhere in Lardner’s writing OK is put to its modern everyday uses. It is no longer a funny abbreviation but a breezy way of indicating that matters are all right.
Ring Lardner’s example was catching. In 1921 Donald Ogden Stewart, another humorist and later a member of the witty Algonquin Round Table, wrote A Parody Outline of History, with each chapter in the style of a noted contemporary author, among them Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, and Sinclair Lewis. Chapter 5 is “The Spirit of ’75: Letters of a Minute Man in the Manner of Ring Lardner.” Here’s that Minute Man:
Well Ethen you will be surprised O. K. to hear I & the wife took a little trip down to Boston last wk. to a T. party & I guess you are thinking we will be getting the swelt hed over being ast to a T. party. In Boston.
And later:
After supper I & her was walking a round giving the town the double O when we seen that Fanny Ewell Hall was all lit up like Charley Davis on Sat. night & I says to Prudence lets go inside I think its free and she says I bet you knowed it was free al right befor you ast me & sure enough it was free only I hadnt knowed it before only I guess that Prudence knows that when I say a thing it is generally O. K.
And finally, on a historical occasion:
Well the other night I and Prudence was sound asleep when I heard some body banging at the frt. door & I stuck my head out the up stares window & I says who are you & he says I am Paul Revear & I says well this is a h—ll of a time to be wakeing a peaceiful man out of their bed what do you want & he says the Brittish are comeing & I says o are they well this is the 19 of April not the 1st & I was going down stares to plank him 1 but he had rode away tow wards Lexington before I had a chanct & as it turned out after words the joke was on me O. K.
George Ade and Ring Lardner were out-and-out humorists. Sinclair Lewis, though a satirist, wasn’t, so his use of OK in dialogue reflects its acceptance as a normal component of American conversation, at least in the business world he satirizes. Here’s a passage from his 1914 novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man:
That same afternoon the manager enthusiastically O. K.’d the plan. To enthusiastically-O. K. is an office technology for saying, gloomily, “Well, I don’t suppose it ‘d hurt to try it, anyway, but for the love of Mike be careful, and let me see any letters you send out.”
So Mr. Wrenn dictated a letter to each of their Southern merchants, sending him a Dixieland Ink-well and inquiring about the crops. He had a stenographer, an efficient intolerant young woman who wrote down his halting words as though they were examples of bad English she wanted to show her friends, and waited for the next word with cynical amusement.
And from Lewis’s 1920 novel Main Street:
Despite Aunt Bessie’s nagging the Kennicotts rarely attended church. The doctor asserted, “Sure, religion is a fine influence—got to have it to keep the lower classes in order—fact, it’s the only thing that appeals to a lot of those fellows and makes ’em respect the rights of property. And I guess this theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it all out, and they knew more about it than we do.”
Lewis’s 1922 satire Babbitt likewise has examples of OK in dialogue. Here is one:
This fellow Graff you got working for you, he leases me a house. I was in yesterday and signs the lease, all O.K., and he was to get the owner’s signature and mail me the lease last night.
Later a speaker addresses the Boosters’ Club:
Some of you may feel that it’s out of place here to talk on a strictly highbrow and artistic subject, but I want to come out flatfooted and ask you boys to O.K. the proposition of a Symphony Orchestra for Zenith. Now, where a lot of you make your mistake is in assuming that if you don’t like classical music and all that junk, you ought to oppose it.
These authors who used OK in modern ways may not have instigated the change from the old funny abbreviation, but they reflected it. By the time the twentieth century was well under way, OK had moved from the fringe of American English to the center.