Matt was talking to me. For a moment I didn’t recognize him.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know what okay is,” I said.
“What?”
“I mean … I don’t know what okay means. No, not what it means. Where it comes from. Where does okay come from?”
We looked it up.
The answer: Nobody knows. They think it is a misspelled variation of all correct—either oll korrect or ole kurreck—but they’re not really sure.
Meaning divorced from origin. And it’s okay.
“Weird,” Matt said.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
He never noticed that I hadn’t answered his first question.