Allan Metcalf, Ph.D.

"It is an impressively worthy biography, description, and analysis of what Metcalf calls 'America's greatest word.' It is a book full of entertaining facts and intriguing suggestions about the American psyche, which the history of OK illuminates. This is a scholarly work, but no dry-as-dust tome. The book is full of life, highly readable, a page-turner. It has no footnotes or bibliographies, but it breathes authenticity. It is a sterling example of what linguistic scholarship can, and should, be for the general reader."--John Algeo in Dictionaries, journal of the Dictionary Society of North America.

“He expands upon the philosophical implications of ‘OK the embodiment of down-to-earth pragmatism and OK the voice of tolerance,’ an amalgam that he takes to be a modern American cornerstone, which makes OK not just America’s greatest word, but ‘its greatest invention.’ All righty, then.”—Roy Blount Jr., New York Times Book Review