Doug Lautzenheiser

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“OK,” which might just be one of the most widely understood English words in the world, came into being as an initialism from “oll korrect,” which was a facetious misspelling of “all correct” that came about because of a short-lived fad in the early nineteenth century for intentional misspellings and the abbreviation thereof. And now you, too, know that there was a short-lived fad in the early nineteenth century for intentional misspellings. English has survived through conquest and adaptation, and many of those adaptations are blunt mistakes and misreadings. A living language made by fallible ...more
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
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