BY THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, OK WAS NO LONGER a joke. The letters O and K did not prompt memories of the misspelled oll korrect, nor did they stimulate alternative explanations. In the nineteenth century, OK was recognized as a humorous abbreviation, but in the twentieth, it was understood merely as an arbitrary combination of letters of the alphabet.
The very look of OK underwent a change. In the nineteenth century, OK almost always appeared with periods, identifying it as an abbreviation. In the twentieth, however, the periods increasingly were absent. And in the twentieth century, more and more it was spelled okay, completely distancing it from any abbreviation and transforming it into an ordinary word.
The meaning of OK was simplified in the twentieth century too. Almost from the date of its birth, in the nineteenth century the abbreviation OK was subject to reinterpretation, beginning with Old Kinderhook and continuing with numerous humorous inventions, as well as the names of clubs. As the twentieth century got under way, those alternatives faded, leaving OK for the most part with the plain, sober definition “all right.”
Gaining familiarity rather than passion, OK also gained the abbreviation oke in the 1920s, and kay or just plain k, both in writing (nowadays including text messages and e-mail) and speaking.
Along with the draining of humor from OK came the draining of enthusiasm, or indeed of any emotion. In 1840 the OK Clubs could inspire voters to support Old Kinderhook for reelection. The clubs formed later in the nineteenth century, from the Harvard OK on down, likewise kept OK spirited. In occasional literary use, OK often colorfully evoked the voice of a decidedly backwoods character. But by the early twentieth century, OK had become value-neutral. It remained affirmative, but it imparted no attributes, admirable or otherwise, as it remains today. When a friend nowadays asks “What do you think of my garden?” to answer “OK” is likely to make the respondent the target of a flowerpot. You’d better use a value word like wonderful or perfect. Even terrible shows more emotional involvement than OK.
So OK no longer was a joke or a showstopper. In the nineteenth century, OK stood out, but in the twentieth, OK was just OK.
To make OK funny in the twentieth century, or to give it emphasis, it needed a twist. And the Roaring Twenties came up with it—several twists, in fact. Beginning in the 1920s we find such twists as okey-dokey and oke-doke, leading up to the okely-dokely now used by cartoon character Ned Flanders on the television show The Simpsons.
The rise of okey-dokey and its relatives took away the pressure on OK to be funny. Once okey-dokey made its appearance, any vestige of humor associated with OK fled to its polysyllabic progeny, leaving OK free of all remaining traces of playfulness. We are inclined to smile when we hear okey-dokey; we hear plain OK with a straight face. The expression born as a blatant joke a century earlier had now become a sober workhorse, ready to undertake ventures in pragmatics and psychology in the postwar years.
Here are some examples of the new twists on old OK. From a 1924 issue of George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury :
Papa Satan, he said, Okey doke! Here we go round and round the old-time mulberry bush! When the woman say no, she really mean yes!
From an article on contemporary slang in the Philadelphia Inquirer of June 16, 1929:
As in non-collegiate circles, the ponderous O. K. has given way to the snappier “oke.” There is a sonorous note about this expression, the compiler says, which has made its vogue immense. Among elite slangsters, in fact, it has almost completely ousted older expressions.
In 1934 a hearing before the U.S. Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate the Munitions Industry elicited the testimony “that tying it up in this bill, it was all ‘okey-dokey.’”
The “Notes and Comment” section of the New Yorker for February 23, 1935, offered a variant spelling:
It’s been quite a month.… A witness in a civil action in Seattle stopped the trial when he answered “Oakie-doke” to a question.
And the Log, the publication of the American Society of Marine Engineers, reported in 1935 from the heartland:
SOUTH DAKOTA.—Everything is okey-doke (excuse it, please) as the state is slopping around in the mud in a way it hasn’t done in several years. It’s such a striking change from last year.
It shows up in Streamline for Health by Philip Bovier Hawk, a diet book published by Harper & Brothers in 1935:
Simply subtract 450 calories from your regular food intake and everything will be okey dokey.
William Faulkner’s novel about flying, Pylon, published in 1935, includes among its characters Jiggs, a mechanic:
“Okey doke,” Jiggs said. The aeroplane waddled out and onto the runway and turned and stopped.
In the New Yorker in 1936, humorist James Thurber was inspired to respond with okie-dokie to a book titled Wake Up and Live! :
Now Mrs. Dorothea Brande has written a book and Simon & Schuster have published it, with the grim purpose in mind of getting me and all the other woolgatherers mentally organized so that, in a world which is going to pieces, we can be right up on our toes.… I don’t want a copy of the book; in fact, I don’t need one. I have got the gist of the idea of “Wake Up and Live!” from reading an advertisement for it in the Sunday Times book section. The writer of the ad said that Mrs. Brande in her inspirational volume suggests “twelve specific disciplines,” and he names these, in abbreviated form. I’ll take them up in order and show why it is no use for Mrs. Brande to try to save me if these disciplines are all she has to offer:
…
“9. Eliminate the phrases ‘I mean’ and “As a matter of fact’ from your conversation.”
Okie-dokie.
“10. Plan to live two hours a day according to a rigid time schedule.”
Well, I usually wake up at nine in the morning and lie there till eleven.
The phrase was associated with the rustic language of farmers in the 1938 Federal Writers’ Project book Delaware: A Guide to the First State.
The Delaware section of US 13 runs more than one-half the length of the so-called Delmarva Peninsula, the low-lying and water-bound region east of Chesapeake Bay that contains the State of Delaware and the Eastern Shores of Maryland and Virginia.
Bordered by few famous buildings and no battlefields or natural wonders but by a countryside of comfortable farmsteads, busy towns and villages, and numerous vistas of quiet beauty, the route is notable for the successive differences and contrasts, great and small, in the aspect of the country and in the life of the people. Within 25 miles there may be differences in terrain, forestation, style or material of old houses, political color, crops and farming methods, tempo of living, accent and expression of speech. A farmer who lives in the southern part of the State and drives a truck-load of vegetables to Wilmington every week, may say “oakie-doke” in one breath and then speak of “housen” for houses, or of a chicken too long killed as “dainty.”
Joe Falls, in the 1977 book 50 Years of Sports Writing (and I Still Can’t Tell the Difference Between a Slider and a Curve), indicates one of the consequences of choosing okey-dokey: In a serious statement, it doesn’t inspire as much confidence as plain OK.
Another time we were flying to Kansas City on a four-engine plane when one of the engines conked out. The pilot told us he had to “feather” it because it was giving him some trouble. No problem, though, he said. He would just detour to Chicago and everything would be okey-dokey. That’s what he said. Okey-dokey.
As I walked down the aisle, I could feel my feet pressing into the floor. Okey-dokey, my butt.
Jump ahead to August 1994 and the Misc. Newsletter, a report on popular culture in Seattle and beyond by Clark Humphrey:
PR LINE OF THE WEEK (postcard to a band’s mailing list): “This is a postcard to promote ‘Running with Scissors’ and to tell you things are going to be okie dokie.… The Scissors Manifesto: 1. Attending our shows and buying our CDs are the keys to ‘okie dokie-ness.’ 2. People who request our songs on the radio are okie dokie. 3. Actually, sex is much better than ‘okie dokie-ness’ but no one will pay us for sex. 4. It would be really great if young people had a reason to feel better than just okie dokie. 5. Foul tasting, over-hyped beverages do not make you feel okie dokie … Not affiliated with any patronizing multinational beverage company.”
As OK did in certain nineteenth-century contexts, okey-dokey in recent times can suggest lack of education, or more positively, simplicity of character. In And the Angels Laughed: 101 Anecdotes and Devotionals (2007), Barbara Eubanks tells of a lady who came down the aisle and told the pastor she wanted to be saved. He asked her if she wanted to talk to the Lord about it.
She replied, “I done did.”
“Well, what did he say?” prodded the pastor.
“He said, ‘Okey-dokey.’”
I’m not sure what colloquial expressions the Lord uses, but
I’m sure he speaks to people in terms they understand.
The playfulness of okey-dokey is evident when it turns up as the name for a recipe in Fondue by Lenny Rice and Brigid Callinan, published in 2007. The artichoke fondue “Okey-dokey Artichokey” is to be paired with Austrian grüner veltliner, which “has a crisp, peppery quality that makes it one of the only reliable artichoke-friendly wines we know.”
Perhaps the name of the recipe was inspired by a children’s book published four years earlier, Okie-dokie, Artichokie! by Grace Lin. That’s the story of a new downstairs neighbor named Artichoke who bangs mysteriously on his ceiling, the protagonist’s floor. “Hey, if I get too loud or something, you can just bang on the ceiling and let me know,” says the protagonist, who happens to be a monkey. The downstairs neighbor is a giraffe, hence the inadvertent banging.
And there’s a fictitious Okie-Dokie Corral in Houston, where the Cheetah Girls, a group of young African American singers in search of success, compete against their archrivals the Cash Money Girls in Showdown at the Okie-Dokie (2000), number 9 in the Cheetah Girls series, aimed at girls in grades four through six.
Like OK itself, okey-dokey has traveled around the world, or so we gather from Autumn Cornwell’s 2007 novel Carpe Diem, narrated by an overachieving sixteen-year-old who backpacks in Southeast Asia with a relative. In Cambodia, she orders from Peppy Pete of Peppy Pete’s Pizzeria:
“So, one large pizza with everything—okey-dokey! Extra peppy?”
“Peppy? Oh, no. Nothing remotely spicy or peppy for me.”
“Okey-dokey!”
“Oh, and a bottle of Chianti,” I said, but added hurriedly: “For my grandma.”
“Okey-dokey smokey!” And he waddled off.
Of all present-day users of expanded versions of OK, however, the most famous is a cartoon character. Ned Flanders, the Simpsons’ utterly good-natured and devoutly Christian next-door neighbor, is noted for extending the two-syllable OK into the six-syllable okely-dokely. He stretches out other words too, as in two 1993 episodes:
Ned: Hi-di-ly-hey, Camper Bart! You ready for today’s meeting?
Bart: You know-dilly know it, Neddy.
Ned: Okely-dokely!
Todd (Ned’s son): We’re not going to church today!
Ned: What? You give me one good reason.
Todd: It’s Saturday.
Ned: Okely-dokeley-doo!
In a 1996 episode, Homer prompts Ned to say it:
Ned: Homer, ah … About those things you borrowed from me over the years, you know, the TV trays, the power sander, the downstairs bathtub … You gonna be needing those things in Cypress Creek?
Homer: Yes.
Ned: Oh. Uh …
Ned: Okely-dokely.
By now, okey-dokey (and variants like okely-dokely) has long lost its freshness—hence its suitability for a not-so-cool character like Ned Flanders. For some, it’s an annoyance. Slang expert Tom Dalzell, in The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2007), acknowledges that okey-dokey is “used for communicating agreement,” but he can’t resist grumbling that it is “an old-fashioned, affected, still popular perversion of OK.”
There’s another not so comical meaning for okey-doke, one that presidential candidate Barack Obama used in speaking to a predominantly African American audience in Sumter, South Carolina, on January 23, 2008. He said, in part:
The point is, part of what happens in Washington is folks will twist your words around, trying to pretend you said something you didn’t say, trying to pretend you didn’t say something you did. We know that game. But that’s the kind of politics that we’ve got to change.…
So don’t be confused when you hear a whole bunch of this negative stuff. Those are the same old tricks. They’re trying to bamboozle you. It’s the same old okey-doke. Y’all know about okey-doke, right? It’s the same old stuff.
It’s like if anybody gets one of these e-mails saying, “Obama is a Muslim.” I’ve been a member of the same church for almost twenty years, praying to Jesus, with my Bible. Don’t let people turn you around. Because they’re just making stuff up. That’s what they do. They try to bamboozle you. Hoodwink you. Try to hoodwink you.
In case anyone didn’t know that definition of okey-doke, candidate Obama was liberal with paraphrase: tricks, same old stuff, bamboozle, hoodwink. But the audience probably did, since that meaning of okey-doke is current in the African American community.
It goes back a while. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang has examples of this meaning as early as 1967. Researcher Ben Zimmer found okey-doke in a 1989 quotation from Spike Lee (“We got robbed, gypped, jerked around—they gave us the okeydoke”) and from Ice Cube in the movie Trespass (“They’re lying to you, K.J., laughing behind your back, got us going for the okeydoke”).
And on a community forum website for Southport, Connecticut, in December 2008, “The Judge” posted this comment regarding the United Illuminating Company:
Right you are DPUC, it’s the same old-same old, okey-dokey! One day these guys are on opposite fences, the next, they are sitting around at fundraisers together and scoffing down pigs in a blanket and cheap chablis.