From “The Mother Tongue”;
“The quintessential Americanism without any doubt is O.K. Arguably America’s single greatest gift to international discourse, O.K. is the most grammatically versatile of words, able to serve as an adjective (“lunch was OK”), verb (“can you Okay this for me?”), noun (“I need your OK on this”), interjection (“O.K., I hear you”), and adverb (“we did OK”).
It is a curious fact that the most successful and widespread of all English words, naturalized as an affirmation into almost every language in the world, from Serbo-Croation to Tagalog, is one that has no correct agreed spelling (O.K., Okay or OK) and one whose origins are so obscure that it has been a matter of heated dispute almost from when it first appeared.”
“According to Allen Walker Read of Columbia University, who spent years tracking down the derivation of O.K., a fashion developed among young wits of Boston and New York in 1838 of writing abbreviations based on intentional illiteracies. They thought it highly comical to write O.W. for “oll wright”, O.K. for “oll korrect”, K.Y. for “know yuse” and so on. O.K. first appeared in print on March 23, 1839, in the Boston Morning Post. Had that been it, the expression would no doubt have died an early death, but conicidentally in 1840 Martin Van Buren, known as Ol Kinderhook from his hometown in upstate New York, was running for reelection as president, and an organization founded to help his campaign was given the name the Democratic O.K. club. O.K. became a rallying cry throughout the campaign and with great haste established itself as a word thoughout the country. This may have been small comfort to Van Buren, who lost the election to William Henry Harrison, who had the no-less-snappy slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”.”
Okay, so now you know all there is to know about OK, and it’s O.K. if you don’t completely get it!
