While writing a story about “refudiate,” Sarah Palin’s linguistic goof, I had the good fortune to interview Allan Metcalf.
Metcalf is an English professor at MacMurray College and executive secretary of the American Dialect Society — so he’s a go-to guy for stories about words and their origins.
In November, Metcalf published a book about a small but feisty word that enjoys common usage all over the English-speaking word:
o.k. Also spelled OK. Also spelled okay.
As Metcalf explains, in OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, o.k first appeared in a Boston newspaper on March 23, 1839.
At that time, there was a penchant for abbreviations that certain editors of the Boston Morning Post enjoyed a little too much, as a series of stories on the A.B.R.S. (Anti-Bell-Ringing Society) suggests. Abbreviating was something of a craze, Metcalf notes, not unlike our use of BTW and LOL today.
The difference was that in Boston in the late 1830s it was also fashionable to mangle the spelling in these abbreviations, which made them even funnier and harder to remember.
So what does OK stand for?