Iwonder about stuff sometime, and a lot of phases that we use everyday we have no idea where they came from like O.K. and here's another, HELLO. Come on yall break it down to me.
2006-09-15 12:31:40 · 3 answers · asked by midnight red 2 in Education & Reference ➔ Words & Wordplay
There are many explanations still bouncing around (some of them guesses, some of them were simply made up), but as a matter of fact, the question was decisively answered by Columbia University professor Allen Walker Read over 40 years ago in a series of articles.
"OK" was invented as a humorous abbreviation for "oll korrect" in the midst of a popular fad for such abbreviations, which began to appear in Boston newspapers ca. 1838 (then spread across the nation). "OK" first appeared in newsprint in 1839 and was, like many other expressions of the time, very popular.
But this one outlived them all BECAUSE of "Old Kinderhook", the nickname for U.S. Vice President Martin VanBuren, who was running for President in 1840.
(The name comes from the fact that his hometown was Kinderhook, New York. I don't have the documentation, but I believe "OLD Kinderhook" may have been coined by analogy with then President Andrew Jackson's nickname "Old Hickory." or other nicknames of this pattern which were popular in the first half 19th century.)
At any rate, supporters of "Old Kinderhook" decided to play off the newly popular expression, and formed "OK Clubs" to support him. The widespread use in the political campaign across the country established this abbreviation, which people discovered was rather handy, so it stuck.
So, two of the common explanations for the term are... 'OK'. The third most common explanation offered -- that Andrew Jackson, not the best of spellers, actually wrote the notation "OK" on papers, intending to mark them as "all correct". This explanation (and others) was the invention of Jackson critics, their response to the VanBuren campaign.
2006-09-15 16:17:03 · answer #1 · answered by bruhaha 7 · 1⤊ 1⤋
Some experts say that in the 1830s, people thought it was funny to misspell words and then abbreviate them. OK stood for "oll korrect," a poorly spelled "all correct."
Hope that helped! Later.
2006-09-15 12:39:33 · answer #2 · answered by im a cool nerd. 2 · 0⤊ 1⤋
No one's really sure about the origin of "OK," but there are a lot of theories. Ask Yahoo! explains them at:
http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20050321.html
2006-09-15 13:07:59 · answer #3 · answered by Fall Down Laughing 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋