The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

the New World, the quintessential Americanism without any doubt was 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 O.K.”), verb (“Can you O.K. this for me?”), noun (“I need your O.K. on this”), interjection (“O.K., I hear you”), and adverb (“We did O.K.”). It can carry shades of meaning that range from casual assent (“Shall we go?” “O.K.”), to great enthusiasm (“O.K.!”), to lukewarm endorsement (“The party was O.K.”), to a more or less meaningless filler of space (“O.K., can I have your attention please?”). 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-Croatian to Tagalog, is one that has no correct agreed spelling (it can be O.K., OK, or okay) and one whose origins are so obscure that it has been a matter of heated dispute almost since it first appeared. The many theories break down into three main camps: 1. It comes from someone’s or something’s initials—a Sac Indian chief called Old Keokuk, or a shipping agent named Obadiah Kelly, or from President Martin Van Buren’s nickname, Old Kinderhook, or from Orrins-Kendall crackers, which were popular in the nineteenth century. In each of these theories the initials were stamped or scribbled on documents or crates and gradually came to be synonymous with quality or reliability. 2. It is ada...