OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word (review)

The term OK is probably the English language's most widely adopted contribution to the various languages of the world. Its use (with some adjustments in orthography and phonology) has been reported in Arabic, Chinese, Filipino, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Sinhalese, Spanish, and Vietnamese; and it is doubtless used in many other linguistic contexts as well. OK began life in American English (hence the subtitle of the book under review), but it has spread. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary labels OK "orig. US," which suggests that it has been fully naturalized in British as well as in more exotic languages. It now belongs to English as a whole and, indeed, it belongs to the international vocabulary used by languages all over the globe.

Early efforts to establish the origin of OK were imaginative at best, without documentation, and often just foolish. The genesis of the term was firmly established by Allen Walker Read, one of our leading authorities on linguistic matters, in a series of articles in American Speech, which documented beyond question the origins of OK. It began as a joke—part of a journalistic fad for abbreviations of comic misspellings—representing "oll korrect" (for all correct). It would doubtless have died as an unremembered and unmourned deviational sport of language except for the fact that it was taken up in the presidential election of 1840 as a pun on a nickname for Martin Van Buren, "Old Kinderhook," an affectionate reference to Van Buren's origins. Van Buren was the eighth president of the United States (from 1837 to 1841), but lost his bid for reelection, defeated by William Henry Harrison. He had been born in the small New York town of Kinderhook, south of Albany, where he was also buried on his death in 1862. Hence he was "Old Kinderhook," which provided a happy pun on OK.

The initial popularity of the term reflected its use as a political byword, with the implication that Old Kinderhook was OK (all correct) and a man of the people. A Democratic OK Club was organized in New York in 1840; and the fashion for such clubs continued long after that election. The term thus spread across the country as a consequence of its use in a national presidential election. But its saucy insouciance doubtless helped to spread its popularity in nineteenth-century America, just as it also was a factor in the exportation of the term around the globe. Its brevity was surely also a factor that recommended it to its many new users.

The true origin of the term OK and the initial process by which it survived its modest beginnings and expanded to become eventually one of the most widely used English words on a global scale was one of Allen Walker Read's greatest contributions to our knowledge of American English and the history of the language. In this book, Allan Metcalf gives full credit to Read for his pioneering work, but Metcalf goes on to expand the background of the history Read identified and to carry on the history of OK into later times. The seventeen chapters of this handy little book set forth everything about OK one could reasonably ask to know. The book is an act of homage to Allen Walker Read, but it is more than that. It is an impressively worthy biography, description, and analysis of what Metcalf calls "America's greatest word." It is a book full of entertaining facts and intriguing suggestions about the American psyche, which the history of OK illuminates. This is a scholarly work, but no dry-as-dust tome. The book is full of life, highly readable, a page-turner. It has no footnotes or bibliographies, but it breathes authenticity. It is a sterling example of what linguistic scholarship can, and should, be for the general reader.

A feeling for the tone of the book, as well as its scope...