Each day, 10 minutes get dedicated to the most complicated exercise I’ve undertaken. Should I reply to the mail or message with ‘ok’, ‘okay’, ‘O.K.’, ‘OK!’, ‘K’ or ‘kk’? It’s worse than having to decide how to sign off emails. Call it absurd, call it a waste of time, call it an obsession, but I get as worried as a prune several times a day.
It’s a simple abbreviation, not even EnglishEnglish as my dead Anglo-Indian physical education teacher from school would have said. Over the years, ‘OK’ has taken on many shades. For many years it was a no strings-attached word. It’s a word that never meant making a commitment. Things have changed, as Bob Dylan may put it succinctly.
Replying to an email or message in 2023 with an “okay” can paint me a stuffed shirt. Cutting it down to ‘OK’ may signify being unfeeling Butchering to ‘K’ means, ‘get lost’, ‘okk’ means trying too hard to finish the conversation. ‘Kk’ is political correctness for Gen Z members (‘kk’ is loathsome if you’re looking for personal opinion). And then there is ‘OK!’ Or a superfluous exclamation to calm down things and make ‘ok’ appear just ‘ok’.
CHEERS TO ‘OLL KORRECT’
All this for an abbreviation that has probably been America’s least spoken popular export. ‘OK’ is not British. ‘OK’ never had the blessings of Buckingham Palace or of Stratford-upon-Avon. It was born in a place where everybody knew everybody. I exaggerate. Boston, which has as tourist trap the famous Cheers bar, gave birth to ‘ok’ or ‘oll korrect’.
There are many origin stories for the abbreviation, like coming from the Greek phrase ‘ola kala’ ‘all good’ and then there is the Choctaw (Native American people based in the Southeastern Woodlands) word ‘okeh’. Don’t fall for them.
The abbreviation is the work of a bunch of Bertie Wooster-like gentlemen who killed time coming up with the oddest of abbreviations. The saying “all correct” has been in circulation as early as 1822. Take the example of a letter that appeared in Connecticut Courant on April 2, 1822: “Having compared the foregoing statement with documents now in the office, I find them all correct.”
There was a fad in the 1830s of intentionally misspelling abbreviations. Think of Wooster sitting at Drones Club, enjoying a stiff highball and then deciding to turn ‘all correct’ into ‘oll korrect’. His friends Bingo Little, Gussie Fink-Nottle and Tuppy Glossop go ‘I say’ and whittle it down to ‘OK’. It has been done before. ‘KC’ was for ‘knuff ced’ or ‘enough said’. ‘KY’ was ‘know yuse’ or ‘no use’. Thankfully, the other abbreviations died a natural death. Not ‘OK’.
By March 23, 1839, Boston Morning Post picked up the abbreviation and printed the following “o.k. — all correct”. Other newspapers picked it up. North Carolina Gazette, on March 16, 1841, wrote “Oll Korrect” or went with the joke.
SIMPLE AND VERSATILE
One swallow doesn’t make a summer. There had to be something more than a newspaper publishing ‘o.k.’. Two incidents happened.
The name Martin van Buren may not ring a bell for most readers. He was the eighth president of the United States from 1837 to 1841. He saw an opportunity. Born in Kinderhook, New York, he adopted the nickname Old Kinderhook, which was shortened to OK during rallies for his reelection. OK clubs sprang up around the US but they couldn’t help the man win another term. But it did give the abbreviation a lifeline.
Then came the telegraph in the US. It transmitted short messages in the form of electric pulses, with a combination of dots and dashes representing letters of the alphabet. ‘O’ and ‘K’ were easy to tap out and were adopted as a signal of transmission received by operators.
Soon, ‘o.k.’ left its Boston home and made the entire country its nest. Newspapers across America started using ‘o.k.’. Allan Metcalf, the author of OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, has said the word was born into a quintessentially American philosophy. ‘Ok’ originally meant satisfactory and it took decades for it to mirror skepticism and mediocrity. He said Americans never liked complicated philosophies or ways of life.
Okay is simple and direct. And it can be versatile. “Okay’s appeal is its versatility. It’s an adjective when you say ‘this is okay’ but it’s also a noun when you say ‘I gave this my okay’ and it can also be averb when you say ‘I okayed it’ and it can also be an adverb when you say ‘she did okay’ and it’s also an interjection when you say ‘Okay!’,” he told CBS years ago.
Another appeal of the word is the ‘k’ in it. The alphabet has been used by brands to grab attention, like Kool-Aid, Kraft and Kleenex. When the word became complicated, one brand even tried to turn it into something massive. Coca-Cola did a study in the late 1980s and found that ‘ok’ was the most recognisable word. Sergio Zyman, the chief of marketing, tried to play on the wordand came up with OK Soda, which only lasted from 1993 to 1995. He thought it was easy to pronounce and the meaning could be bent to fit different scenarios. Coca-Cola’s special projects manager Brian Lanahan explained to Time magazine: “It underpromises. It doesn’t say, ‘This is the next big thing.’ It’s the flipside of overclaiming.” Needless to say, the campaign was a blunder, at least for that era.
The word ‘ok’ has spawned the popular psychology book, I’m OK —You’re OK by Thomas Anthony Harris. It attributes the fourth “life position” — “an eyeball-to-eyeball commitment with nothing held back, a dangerous, a risky, a rarely-seen relationship contract. Yet, it is one of hope, and it is attainable”. All this brings me back to my dilemma. We have changed a simple abbreviation to something that can offend people. That ‘ok’ can be threatening or passive-aggressive was unthinkable a few decades ago. It has reached a point when I have started judging people who text back ‘ok’. Is it vague and unprofessional? I have no answer and so I have shifted to ‘cool’ or should I say, ‘kewl’?