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Complex Numbers #976594 added February 29, 2020 at 12:01am
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D'accord!
Etymology is something of an interest of mine, combining history and language studies... and maybe a bit of mob psychology in the mix.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/50042/whats-real-origin-ok
What's the Real Origin of "OK"?
Yes, this is from 2013. So what? It's not like language is going out of style anytime soon.
By Arika Okrent
Oh, I see what you did there, OK-Rent.
"OK" is the all-purpose American expression that became an all-purpose English expression that became an all-purpose expression in dozens of other languages.
Still not as versatile as "fuck," but, OK.
There may be more stories about the origin of "OK" than there are uses for it
Just as intriguing for me as etymology is folk etymology; that is, the stories we tell ourselves about the origins of words or expressions. Some of these are just blatantly wrong, such as the idea that the monosyllabic vulgarity I mentioned above originally came from the acronym "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" (now immortalized as the title of a Van Halen album) or "Fornicating Under Consent of the King," each of which expressions contains entirely too much Latin for to be taken seriously - but people still believe one or the other.
Or, one time, I used the phrase "rule of thumb" around an angry woman, who proceeded to chide me for using an expression that "came from an ancient rule about only being able to beat one's wife with a stick no bigger than your thumb." Which is patent nonsense, but OK. No point in arguing with people like that; they're not going to change their minds.
Point is, even the false etymologies tell us something about human nature and what we're inclined to believe.
The truth about OK, as Allan Metcalf, the author of OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word, puts it, is that it was "born as a lame joke perpetrated by a newspaper editor in 1839."
Lest anyone still be laboring under the misapprehension that comedy isn't meaningful.
It wasn't as strange as it might seem for the author to coin OK as an abbreviation for "all correct." There was a fashion then for playful abbreviations like i.s.b.d (it shall be done), r.t.b.s (remains to be seen), and s.p. (small potatoes). They were the early ancestors of OMG, LOL, and tl;dr.
And we thought the military went overboard with its acronyms.
OK got lucky by hitting the contentious presidential election jackpot. During the 1840 election the "oll korrect" OK merged with Martin van Buren's nickname, Old Kinderhook, when some van Buren supporters formed the O.K. Club.
This process, of a thought taking on a life of its own, is the sort of thing that Dawkins meant when he coined the word "meme," not captioned cat photos. Ironically, such a shift in definition is itself the hallmark of a meme.
Now, you might ask yourself, "How do we know this is true and not the other origin stories?" But that strays perilously close to "How do we know anything at all?" I find epistemology to be a fine, upstanding word, but not something I'd like to argue about.
But, as Metcalf says, its ultimate success may have depended on "the almost universal amnesia about the true origins of OK that took place early in the twentieth century.
And that's the fascinating part to me - to trace how these things develop over time. Sometimes we don't know and have to guess, but even the guesses can shed light on meaning. I'm OK with that. |
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