Why do we say OK

There's a two-letter word we hear everywhere. CORRECT. Alright. Okay, how are you, Annie? OK OK OK, OK girls… OK is probably the most recognizable word on the planet. ALL RIGHT! CORRECT. It's essential to the way we communicate with each other and even with our technology. Alexa, turn off the living room lights. CORRECT. You can use it every day, even if you don't notice it. But what does OK really mean? And where does it come from? Hmm. CORRECT. Alright. Alright, thank you. OK really goes back to the 1830s fashion for intentionally misspelled acronyms. Young Boston "intellectuals" please "strangers" with coded messages like KC, or "snuff ced", KY, "know yuse" and OW, "oll wright". Haha. But thanks to a few strokes of luck, one acronym stands out above the rest: OK, or "everything is fine."

In the early 1800s, "everything was fine" was a common phrase used to confirm that everything was fine. Its abbreviated cousin began to go mainstream on March 23, 1839, when OK was first published in the Boston Morning Post.

Soon, other newspapers picked up the joke and carried it around the country until OK was something everyone knew, not just a few Boston insiders. And OK's budding popularity even led a restless American president of Kinderhook, New York, to adopt it as a nickname during his re-election campaign in 1840. Van Buren's supporters have set up OK Clubs around the country, and their message is clear: Old Kinderhook is "it's okay". The campaign was widely publicized and was poorly reported by the press. His opponents eventually turned the acronym against him, saying it stood for "Orful Konspiracy" or "Orful Katastrophe" Hah. In the end, even a clever nickname didn't save Van Buren's presidency. But it's a win for OK. This 1840 presidential campaign firmly established OK in the vernacular of America.

And while those same acronyms are out of fashion, OK made the transition from slang to legal, functional usage with one invention: the telegraph. If we lower the bridge, the current will shift to sound. At the other end, the current supplies an electromagnet that attracts the armature. The armature clicks a screw and touches a message. The telegraph was first introduced in 1844, just five years after OK. It transmits short messages as electrical pulses, with a combination of dots and dashes representing the letters of the alphabet. It's time to shine. Both letters are easy to type and very difficult to be confused with anything else. It was quickly adopted as the standard admission of a received transmission, especially by the operators of the expanding American railroad. This telegraph manual from 1865 goes even further, stating that "no notice shall be deemed to have been transmitted until the office has received notice of consent". OK has become serious business.

But there's another big reason the two letters get stuck, and not just because they're easy to communicate. It has to do with the appearance of OK. Or more specifically, what the letter K looks and sounds like. It's rare to start a word with the letter K in English - it ranks 22nd in the alphabet. This scarcity fueled "Kraze for K" in advertising and print at the turn of the century, where companies replaced the hard C with a K to get your attention. The idea is that changing a word - like this Klearflax Linen Carpet or this Kook-Rite kitchen, for example - will draw more attention to that word. And it's still an intuitive strategy: we see the letter K represented in modern corporate logos, like Krispy-Kreme and Kool-Aid. It's the K that makes it so memorable.

By the 1890s, OK's Boston roots had been largely forgotten and newspapers began to debate his story, often perpetuating myths in the process that some still believed. Like claiming that it comes from the Choctaw word "okeh", which means "it is so". Choctaw gave us the word OK… The beginnings of OK were hazy but that didn't really matter anymore - the word was embedded in Our language. Today, we use it as the final "neutral assertion". Okay. Alright. Learn to truly love yourself. CORRECT. CORRECT. Come here! ALL RIGHT! I don't know what to say. Say okay. CORRECT. It was founded then! Allan Metcalf wrote the definitive history of OK, and he explains that the word "affirms without judgment," meaning it doesn't convey emotion - it just acknowledges and accepts information. If you "go home safely", that means you are not injured. If "your food is good" it's okay. And "OK" confirms the change of plan. At this point, it's a bit confusing - we don't even track how much we use it. Maybe that's why OK is said to be the first word spoken when man set foot on the moon. Not bad for a silly 1830s joke. Okay guys, stop it.