Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum here, the word okay is probably the most
Speaker 1: spoken word in the world. Even outside of its originator English,
Speaker 1: people say okay in some dozen languages, including Spanish, Italian,
Speaker 1: and Russian. But where did it come from? And how
Speaker 1: do you spell it? That second one is easy. Most
Speaker 1: dictionaries have accepted that people vacillate among the two letter
Speaker 1: okay and the four letter okay and say that either
Speaker 1: are well okay. But as to its origins, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of myths. Some say it was borrowed from
Speaker 1: a Choctaw word okay. Others suggest it originated with the
Speaker 1: Boston baker named Otto Kimmel, who liked to frost his
Speaker 1: initials into his biscuits. Couldn't have had anything to do
Speaker 1: with the state of Oklahoma abbreviated oak or the musical Oklahoma, Nope, Nope,
Speaker 1: and nope. For the article, this episode is based on
Speaker 1: How Stuffworks, spoke the Anatoly Lieberman, a linguist, translator and
Speaker 1: language professor at the University of Minnesota. He said, okay
Speaker 1: is the greatest American word. The history of okay is
Speaker 1: a history of incredible success. But nobody could have predicted
Speaker 1: that success. As you'll see, okay began as a piece
Speaker 1: of insider slang from the late eighteen thirties and wrote
Speaker 1: a losing presidential campaign to nationwide fame and eventually worldwide ubiquity.
Speaker 1: But let's start at the beginning. In the early eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: new printing technologies dramatically reduced the cost of publishing newspapers,
Speaker 1: and there was a resulting explosion of inexpensive new daily
Speaker 1: periodicals known collectively as the penny press, competing for readers.
Speaker 1: Penny papers and cities like New York, Philadelphia in Boston
Speaker 1: published not only straight news stories, but also witty takes
Speaker 1: on the latest political scandals, social scenes, and popular trends.
Speaker 1: Think of it as the Internet of the eighteen thirties,
Speaker 1: and much like the Internet, the lively back and forth
Speaker 1: chatter between penny paper editors gave birth to new ways
Speaker 1: of writing and eventually new ways of speaking. Famed etymologist
Speaker 1: Alan Walker Reid worked on and off for some twenty
Speaker 1: years to trace the full history of the word okay
Speaker 1: back in the middle of the nineteen hundreds. A note
Speaker 1: that this was decades before digitized newspaper archives were keyword searchable.
Speaker 1: Lieberman said Reid must have spent hundreds of hours digging
Speaker 1: through tons and tons of physical newspapers, journals, private letters,
Speaker 1: and other documents. In a research paper published in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty three in the journal American Speech, Reid explained that
Speaker 1: the road to Okay began in the summer of eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty eight in Boston. There there developed what he called
Speaker 1: a remarkable vogue that might well be called a craze
Speaker 1: of using abbreviations a Boston's Morning Post used in June
Speaker 1: and July of that year comically complicated acronyms for anything
Speaker 1: and everything. For example, RTBS for remains to be seen,
Speaker 1: dl ec for do let them come, and GTDHD for
Speaker 1: give the devil his due, the last of which editor
Speaker 1: Charles Gordon Green was obligated to explain a few days later,
Speaker 1: after having received several letters from confounded readers. By nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty nine, the initial language, as it was sometimes called,
Speaker 1: had arrived in New York City and had already leapt
Speaker 1: from print to fashionable slang. The editors of New York's
Speaker 1: Even Tattler wrote, this is a species of spoken shorthand,
Speaker 1: which is getting into very general use among loafers and
Speaker 1: gentlemen of the fancy. They claimed to have overheard a
Speaker 1: conversation between two young sweethearts where the girl turned to
Speaker 1: her bow and said OKKBWP, which they speculated could have
Speaker 1: meant nothing but one kind kiss before we part. This
Speaker 1: all reminds me of how modern text and chat abbreviations
Speaker 1: have made their way into verbal vernacular. Perhaps you've heard
Speaker 1: someone dryly end an unfunny sentence with lol. And another
Speaker 1: thing that Internet users have sometimes shared with nineteenth century Americans,
Speaker 1: some thought it was really funny to purposefully misspell stuff.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of the way that we modernly might
Speaker 1: caption a photo or video of a cat or dog
Speaker 1: when it's supposed to be written in the animal's voice,
Speaker 1: or how we use misspellings to denote regional accents. Note
Speaker 1: that this kind of humor at its worst can be
Speaker 1: pretty meanly classist, punching down at those of us humans
Speaker 1: who have had less access to education. Tried not to
Speaker 1: do that, but at any rate, By the late eighteen thirties,
Speaker 1: the misspelling trend had combined with the acronym trend to
Speaker 1: produce punchy abbreviations like ky for no use as if
Speaker 1: it were spelled knowyus, or OW for all right as
Speaker 1: if it were spelled oll wright. Absolutely, no one says
Speaker 1: ky or ow anymore, But believe it or not, that
Speaker 1: wordplay laid the groundwork for the arrival of the two
Speaker 1: letter abbreviation that would conquer the world. In the spring
Speaker 1: of eighteen thirty nine, Charles Gordon Green, the editor of
Speaker 1: Boston's Morning Post, was engaged in some good natured trash
Speaker 1: talk with the editors of the Providence Journal in Rhode Island.
Speaker 1: It had to do with a semi satirical citizens group
Speaker 1: in Boston called the Anti Bell Ringing Society or ABRs,
Speaker 1: of which Green was a member. Providence Paper poked fun
Speaker 1: at Green and the ABRs, and Green had to set
Speaker 1: the record straight. So it was that on March twenty
Speaker 1: first of eighteen thirty nine, at the end of a
Speaker 1: short paragraph defending the ABRs, Green coined the acronym OKA,
Speaker 1: meaning all correct, similar to using OW for all right.
Speaker 1: Green had coined this new misspelled acronym okay for olll
Speaker 1: krr ect. Three days after Green introduced Oka to the world,
Speaker 1: the Providence Journal editors responded with an ok of their own.
Speaker 1: Alike other offbeat acronyms of the day, okay was an
Speaker 1: inside joke randomly thrust into general circulation. But unlike ow,
Speaker 1: which enjoyed brief popularity in the eighteen thirties, okay didn't
Speaker 1: die out. And that's thanks to Martin Van Buren, the
Speaker 1: eighth President of the United States, held from the small
Speaker 1: town of Kinderhook, New York. Similar to his mentor and
Speaker 1: fellow Democrat Andrew Jackson, who was known as Old Hickory,
Speaker 1: Van Buren's nickname was Old Kinderhook. In the eighteen forty
Speaker 1: presidential election, William Henry Harrison and the Whig Party challenged
Speaker 1: the incumbent Van Buren. Harrison supporters came up with the
Speaker 1: Ketchee for its time campaign slogan and song Tipper Canoe
Speaker 1: and Tyler III. The Democrats swung back with the slogan
Speaker 1: of their own, Okay is okay, as in Old Kinderhook
Speaker 1: is All correct. Clubs sprung up in early eighteen forty
Speaker 1: that spread the slogan, making the word okay part of
Speaker 1: mainstream political conversation. Van Buren lost badly, but okay definitely
Speaker 1: won After eighteen forty, the word spread like wildfire and
Speaker 1: never looked back. Originally, okay appeared in documents and telegraph messages,
Speaker 1: which may count for its international spread, but not in
Speaker 1: everyday speech, as it was slangy, but that changed over time.
Speaker 1: Back in twenty twelve, a linguist Alan Metcalf published a
Speaker 1: book called Okay, The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word.
Speaker 1: In an article for BBC Magazine the previous year, he
Speaker 1: speculated as to why okay became popular all over the world.
Speaker 1: He wrote, It's not that it was needed to fill
Speaker 1: a gap in any language. Before eighteen thirty nine, English
Speaker 1: speakers had yes, good, fine, excellent, satisfactory, and all right.
Speaker 1: What okay provided that the others did not was neutrality,
Speaker 1: a way to affirm or to express agreement without having
Speaker 1: to offer an opinion. Okay allows us to view a
Speaker 1: situation in simplest terms, just okay or not, which sounds
Speaker 1: pretty okay to us. Today's episode is based on the
Speaker 1: article Made in America, The Ridiculous History of Okay on
Speaker 1: HowStuffWorks dot com, written by Dave Ruse. Brain Stuff is
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot com and
Speaker 1: is produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts My Heart Radio,
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