My favourite etymologies: OK (part I)
The greatest Bostonian invention since clam chowdah
It would be hard to qualify which word is the most commonly spoken in the world, but OK (or okay) would probably earn at least a podium place. You’ll find it on every continent. You’ll hear it in Japanese, German, Turkish, Filipino, and very possibly every other language on the planet. It is quite remarkable then that for the majority of its existence, the origins of OK were shrouded in mystery. The word was everywhere, but had seemingly come from nowhere. We knew that it had been popularised by the Americans and that it had become widespread by the 1850s, making it a fairly new word, but somehow, everything beyond that was up for debate.
And debated it was. Most theories attributed OK to a reinterpretation of a foreign word—perhaps from Choctaw or a west African language brought over by slaves. A corruption of the Scottish och aye was even proposed. As it turns out, though, OK is a home-grown word. To see where it came from, let’s go back to the summer of 1838. Let’s go to Boston, baby!
The 1830s marked the start of the golden age of newspapers and Boston was right at the heart of things. In 1830, Bostonians became the first to benefit from the penny press model, a new style of publishing enabled by dirt-cheap printing technology. Previously, newspapers had mostly been sold on a subscription basis. Now, the cost of making extra copies was so low that publishers could print a surplus to hawk on the streets and in shops. With any passer-by a potential customer, broadsheets began to to cast as broad a net as possible. Political and financial news remained the backbone of their publications, but they began to pad the gaps between with gossip, humorous tidbits, and other pieces of “filler” content, often no more than a few lines long.
This was perhaps the genesis of text-based humour as we know it. Never before had printed jokes been in such high demand nor circulation. If a joke proved popular with readers, it might be circulated around to other penny papers in the country to be reprinted for their own audiences. Thus, columns filled up with throwaway gags and one-liners meant to earn a quick laugh and be forgotten by the time tomorrow’s issue had rolled off the press.
Editors quickly zeroed in on the burgeoning American urban middle class as a source of material. A classic comedic staple of the 1830s and 40s was to replace common words or phrases with exaggeratedly pompous ones, often as an imagined affect of polite society.
A variation on the gag was to use acronyms instead. Again, the main target was the language of the educated city-dwellers. O.F.M., short for “our first men”—a popular phrase referring to the well-to-do gents about town—was one of the earliest such acronyms to become popular. Names of trendy drinks were commonly abbreviated, like G.C. for gin cocktail, as were many generic short phrases. N.G. for “no go” became popular, as did A.R. for “all right”.
In the summer of 1838, acronym jokes exploded into a craze among American newspapers, first in Boston then nationwide. Mr Charles Gordon Greene, founder and editor of The Boston Post, established himself early on as one of the most prolific and innovative abbreviators. Greene was already notorious around the country for his dry sense of humour. Each edition of The Post was filled with jabs at the people of Boston, local public figures, the Whig party, the temperance movement, the other newspapers of Boston, and anyone else who fell afoul of Greene. No one was too big to intimidate him nor too insignificant to escape his notice. Like many of its competitors, The Post thrived on banal gossip and hearsay, but Greene’s clever insight elevated penny journalism to an art form. The story of a woman being brought to court over the theft of 40 cents’ worth of salmon (approximately $15 in today’s currency) could have made for tedious reading, but in his capable hands it became glib social commentary.
“A warrant was then issued against Ellen, and very properly; for eating salmon is the peculiar and exclusive prerogative of the gender masculine, and class O. F. M. It is quite bad enough for females to be abolitionists, Malthusian philosophers, professors of political economy, she-presidents and she-secretaries, and other semi masculine monstrosities: but when they aspire to equal rights of gormandizing on Salmon, with Our First Men, it is tune to pause, as political editors say, by way of climax sublime. Salmon, indeed! and forty cents’ worth, too, for a woman; and she a poor woman—it is not to be endured.”
—The Boston Morning Post, July 17, 1838
With no fewer than 40 newspapers circulating in Boston during the 1830s, each one had to offer something special in order to stand out. The Post’s U.S.P. was Greene’s wit. He had a knack for drawing out the comedic thread from absolutely anything, or in some cases, absolutely nothing. If the news was slow one day, that was no problem at all for The Post—Greene would simply make something up.
Melancholy.—We understand that J. Eliot Brown, Esq., Secretary of the Boston Young Men’s Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Indians, F. A. H. (fell at Hoboken, N. Y.) on Saturday last at 4 o’clock, P. M. in a duel W. O. O. O. F. C. (with one of our first citizens.) What measures will be taken by the Society in consequence of this heart rending event, R. T. B. S. (remains to be seen.)
—The Boston Morning Post, June 12, 1838
The above item from Tuesday, June 12 1838’s Morning Post seems bizarre at first—what kind of paper would exploit a man’s violent death for laughs? Of course, there was no duel in Hoboken on June 9, because J. Eliot Brown, Esq. did not exist and the Boston Young Men’s Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Indians was but one of the many running gags that Greene had serialised in The Post. The news items above and below the death notice were perfectly real, but the death notice itself was not.
While it might seem deceitful to insert fraudulent articles into a source of otherwise-legitimate news, The Post’s readers were probably already in on the joke. For several years, the tumultuous history of the Boston Young Men’s Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Indians (more commonly referred to as the B.Y.M.S.M.C.I.) had been unfolding on the pages of Greene’s paper. In 1836, the Society suffered allegations of corruption and embezzlement amongst its board, though scandal was avoided when it came to light that the mysteriously vanishing funds were being siphoned to abolitionists in New Orleans. Unfortunately, the incident angered the famous local actor Mr Finn and jeopardised the Society’s working relationship with him, though he came around in time to deliver a lecture on their behalf the next year on the topic of “fish of Newport, with a digression on the piscatory propensities of the Sandwich tribes”. This was to be part of one of several fanciful lecture series hosted by the Society.
Despite their purported mission, the Society’s reported encounters with Indians were fairly infrequent and the amount of meliorating that they accomplished was minimal—so preoccupied were they by their packed roster of dinners, parades, lectures, assemblies, and so on. In fact, they were part of a large social community of other societies and public figures, all invented by Greene. He maintained and developed the Society’s world with impressive continuity over the years, often laying the foundations for new jokes months in advance. After printing a report in 1837 of a “monster cod” so big it took six gentlement to reel in (the dispatch was attributed to one Mr J. Hake), the Monster Cod Association became a recurring gag in The Post, popping up for years afterwards. The M.C.A. had no stated purpose but was furnished with a silver cod-shaped medal awarded each year on the anniversary of the big catch, a place in the B.Y.M.S.M.C.I.’s annual parade, and a motto: “Round and round the cauldron go, let it simmer, nice and slow!”
In his imaginary Boston, Greene found an outlet for his frustrations with the real one. As the proprietor of a popular newspaper, Greene was very much embedded in the world he was satirising. The endless procession of functionaries, the frantic and fruitless organising of thousands of civic societies, the awards and titles and honours that seemed to outnumber deserving recipients—it all would have been an inescapable part of life for the 1830s society man. Greene had begun life as working-class boy from New Hampshire, orphaned at the tender age of 8, and one can easily imagine how he found the world of native privilege quite grating.
The acronym was just one weapon in Greene’s satirical arsenal, but it proved to be perhaps the most effective one. Over the summer of 1838, his acronyms caught on like wildfire, finding their way to the furthest corners of the United States. Some of the snappier ones even made the transition from print to speech. These developments can be seen in writers’ gradual dropping of explanatory brackets from phrases like O.F.M. and N.G. It also became common to treat O.F.M. as a singular noun, resulting in phrases like “our O.F.M.’s” and “an O.F.M.” which become nonsensical if the acronym is read out in full.
By mid-June of 1838, the abbreviation fad was widespread enough in Boston that it warranted a jocular letter of complaint to The Post, which Greene dutifully reprinted (though he declined to respond).
(N.B.—The four acronyms at the end are all alcoholic beverages—wine bitters, gin cocktails, brandy cobblers, and port wine sangarees, the last one an early version of sangria.)
Whether this is a genuine letter or another one of Greene’s concoctions, it does quite insightfully hit on the spirit of the trend. Abbreviations had taken on a life of their own. While they had ostensibly begun as a way of satirising the self-absorbed language and ways of the urbanites, they had quickly become an in-group signifier for the very same people. Simply put, the nonsensical nature of the acronyms had become the reason for using them. The less obvious an acronym’s meaning was, the more one had to be tuned into the cultural trends in order to use it correctly. Even as Greene was poking fun at the culture of the Boston elites, he was contributing to it as well. He continued to play with the format, adding further layers of obfuscation to his gags. “All right” could be represented by A.R., but an alternative, O.W., short for “oll wright”, added a deliberate misspelling into the equation.
They are making a great many paragraphs about the murder of a turtle at Parker & Whitney’s. Why don’t they try a bowl and certify that it is o. w.—all right.
—The Boston Morning Post, July 30, 1838
His invented world grew in complexity, too. In the autumn of 1838, a new group was added to Greene’s canon—the Anti-Bell Ringing Society, which paradoxically was formed to protest new Boston laws banning the ringing of dinner bells. Clearly this was Greene’s latest pet peeve dredged up from the mire of civic bureaucracy.
The A.B.R.S. met in January of 1839 to ratify their new constitution and celebrate over a hearty meal. At least, that’s what The Boston Post related. The group received a nice little write-up outlining its many committee roles, including “Lord High Chancellor, and Keeper of the Society’s Conscience”, “Chief Butler and Imperturbable Deliberator”, “Confabulator, to do all the Society’s Unnecessary Talking”, “Professor of Bell-ocution”, “Benign Reliever of the Bell-y-ache”, and “Pacificator of Canadian Re-bells”. There was even an anti-bell ringing song to be sung on special occasions. So rich with detail were The Post’s accounts of the A.B.R.S. that one would be tempted to think the group really was convening regularly—were it not for the fact that the public meetings were advertised to take place in the Exchange Coffee House, a grand and imposing structure which had burned down some twenty years prior.
In youth it jingles us on to school,
And it jingles us home to dinner;
It jingles the wise man, it jingles the fool,
It jingles the saint, it jingles the sinner;
It jingles the doctor, it jingles the preacher,
It jingles the lawyer, it jingles the teacher;
It jingles us all, whate’er we’er about,
It jingles us in life and will jingle us out.
—The Anti-Bell Ringing Song, as related in The Boston Post on January 19, 1839
While the A.B.R.S. probably never existed as described, it was still in some ways a group effort. Greene’s slang innovations caught on because he was a well-known and highly-regarded humourist with publishing connections in every major city. His peers in Boston and further afield were eager to be in on his little conceits—perhaps because this lessened their chances of becoming the target. In March of 1839, in response to an announcement in The Boston Post about an A.B.R.S. field trip to New York, the editor of the Providence Journal sent Greene a wry letter admonishing the Bell-Ringers for failing to stop by Rhode Island on the way. Greene printed the letter in The Post with the following response beneath it:
There we have it, then! The first usage of OK in print, as far as anyone has been able to tell today. It’s an unlikely word, the product of layers and layers of in-jokes and abstractions that essentially boil down to a familiar concept—misspelling and overexplaining things is funny.
In much the same way as its predecessor acronyms, OK quickly took off. By the autumn of 1839, we hear that it is standard parlance among New York financiers, alongside other abbreviated misspellings like N.S.M.J.—’nuff said ‘mong ‘gentlemen.
Thus, with its origins established, only one question remains: nobody uses O.F.M. or N.G. or F.A.H. (Fell At Hoboken, NY) any more. So what kept OK from going the way of its kin?
You’ll be happy to hear that there’s an equally interesting story there. But it’s a story for next time! See you soon in Washington DC…
F.Y.I.—the newspaper clippings used in this article, unless otherwise credited, were taken from newspaperarchive.com, which operates on a paid subscription basis but can be accessed with a seven-day free trial. Where newspaperarchive.com’s scans were too blurry to share, I took quotes from Allen Walker Read’s exhaustive study of the etymology of OK.
Fascinating, and I can't wait for the next installment. For what it's worth, relative to "OK" being widespread: Back in about 1966 when I was in elementary school our class had a visit from a Peace Corps volunteer who was teaching in Nigeria, though I don't recall what part. He told us that in the native language, "okeh" meant "you rat", so when he would tell someone "write this on the board, okay?" he was really telling them "write this on the board, you rat!". No idea why I remember this 60 years on, but I do!
Such a good read