Allan Metcalf, Ph.D.

  OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word. New York: Oxford University Press, October 2010.

What is now America's greatest and most influential word had an improbably humble origin.

 

OK began as a joke--an intentionally misspelled abbreviation of "all correct"--in a Boston newspaper on Saturday, March 23, 1839. Most such jokes would fade as quickly as they came, but luck smiled twice on OK in its infancy. First, it was borrowed as a watchword for the 1840 Presidential campaign of incumbent Martin Van Buren, whose nickname "Old Kinderhook" became O.K. for short. He lost that election, but OK soldiered on, thanks to the second lucky break: the story that President Andrew Jackson was the first to use OK, as an unintentional misabbreviation of "all correct" on documents he approved. That was  pure hoax: Jackson did no such thing. But that practice soon became reality, and OK developed serious uses, not only in marking documents but also in telegraphy and on railroads, both of which also were in their infancy at that time.

 

OK was avoided by the best writers of the nineteenth century, even users of slang like Mark Twain and Bret Harte, but by the early twentieth century OK had made itself at home in literature as well as business and  conversation.

 

The publication in 1969 of the book I'm OK--You're OK by Thomas A. Harris marked another turning point. The particulars of the Transactional Analysis psychology explained in that book are rarely mentioned nowadays, but the notion that it's OK for me to be me, and for you to be you, even if we're different, has become embedded in the American way of life. Considering that OK now is a two-letter encapsulation of the American philosophies both of making it do and of tolerating and even welcoming differences, it could be argued that OK is America's most important invention.

Research to the Point. [Textbook on the research paper.] 2nd edition. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995. ix + 214 pp. Also Instructor's Guide, vii + 55 pp.