Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, standing in for day Eve, and that makes this short stuff. Okay, m.
Thanks to Dave Rus and HowStuffWorks dot com and grammarly for this, because we're talking about okay, which some people say is one of the most versatile and one of the greatest words in the English language.
Yeah, and I don't disagree.
I don't either. I say, like more, but I think okay is probably second in my vocabulary.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Grammarly, we'll tell you that okay can be used in myriad ways and it's a very versatile word.
It can be used as.
An adjective, Oh that's okay, Yeah, that's just okay, like how was it okay?
Right exactly.
It can be an interjection okay, okay, let's talk, or someone's talking too much, okay, okay, right.
Yeah. It can be used in the verb sense, like give me an example.
That guy's really okaying that boat all over the lake.
Okay, that's not that's not right, more like it's being okay as we.
Speak, Oh good, yes, thank you, all right.
Or it can be used in the noun sense you want to try that one.
I'm having an Okay for breakfast.
Nope, uh, we got the Okay, it's all good, yeh, I know, so boring.
Okay, No, it's not boring. I'm just disgusting with myself.
So very versatile word and the origin of okay. I don't even think we should go over all the kind of dumb ideas people have had, because we're pretty sure we know where it came from, right, Okay.
See, so yeah, we know where it came from, almost certainly thanks to an etymologist named Alan Walker Reid, who at some point apparently put down his insects in his lab and started researching origins. I don't know why, but Reid was working back in the nineteen sixties and he essentially, through really hardcore, old timey pre internet research, Yeah, traced back the origin of oka, the letter O and the letter K and the meaning of it as we understand it.
And it's got one heck of a rump slap in origin if you ask me.
Yeah.
He also had a newsletter called Stuff you Should Know that ran for fifteen years, but he only put out four topics because it took him so long.
Yeah, it took a while. But this is the sixties.
Even that joke was not okay.
It was okay, it was okay.
So what he found out is the following in the early nineteenth century, when printing was sort of a new sort of not new, but it was cheaper to do than it had been previously, and there was an explosion of printing. Yeah, and one of the things that people started putting out were something on the penny press, like these sort of rags that were had a little bit of news to them, but also some opinion stuff, some jokes.
This is what's trending.
This is a little witty poem, you know, just little things like that. They've kind of likens it to the Internet of the eighteen thirties. And there was a lot of back and forth about this stuff through the editors of these penny papers. I guess they would they would sort of respond to one another through their own penny papers.
Yeah, they would trash talk one another, kind of like how our old stale rivalry with John Strickland, Oh gosh, kind of like that, right, uh huh. So there was that trash talking or that joking in joking back and forth between editors of these penny papers coincided with a trend that Reid called a cranes in starting in the summer of eighteen thirty eight. That's how good this guy's research was. He pinned it down to that, starting in Boston,
that people started using abbreviations for everything. It was like they thought that was so hilarious in eighteen thirties Boston.
Yeah, which is funny, like you think you might think now is so over abbreviated like this point in time, with texting in the Internet, with lols and I don't even know what half of them mean. I feel like and lo means lots of love, lots of love. Okay, that's what I thought. But the craze started back then. And here's just a few examples that Dave dug up, let me see, dl ec do let them come, or GTDHD give the devil a due, stuff.
Like that, or WYG will you go?
Oh? Will you go?
Yeah? And so this started thanks to Charles Gordon Green, editor of Boston's Morning Post, back in eighteen thirty eight, and by the following year, this initial language is what they called it. It spread from Boston all the way to New York and elsewhere. It was a jam. It was a craze and people were writing about it, people were using it. So you have part one of where
Oka came from. You have an abbreviation craze that is being spreading like wildfire thanks to the penny papers that you can find in any major city in the US.
Now that's right, and we're going to take a break and we'll tell you about another craze that also coincided that made okay okay right after this.
Well, now we're.
Driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from Josh Pam Chuck. It's stuff you should.
Know, all right, all right, So several things aligned here to make okay stick. We talked about the abbreviation craze, but no one is going around saying GTDHD give the devil his due. Most of these fell by the wayside over time. Okay did not because Okay also coincided with another weird trend, which was purposefully misspelling things. It was just funny, I guess. I don't know if it was like a bit where you were trying to appear like
you were just a big dummy or what. But it became a thing where people would write, and especially in these these penny press papers, they would misspell things. They would write an opinion piece or like a letter, and
it's things were purposely misspelled, and people thought it was hysterical. Yeah, and so you got things like, all of a sudden, you had abbreviations that were based on misspellings, like KG for no go, which would be obviously n O g O instead of k now go, but they would still say KG and people just rolled with laughter.
Yeah, no know stood in for no N a lot, so no go no use was actually ky. They spelled use with the y at the beginning.
And you know what's funny is quite a few times over the years people have emailed us and done s Y S N by accident, and it's sort of kind of right aligned with this, you know.
Yeah, some people also do s U S k oh. Yeah, I've seen that too, which makes sense. Took me years to figure that one out. I always thought it was fat fingered or something. But as far as our episode is concerned, when OW came along, the origins of okay started to blossom. Now started to sprout from the ground like a seedling with just one leaf attached.
That's right, because OW stood for all right, all being spelled ol l because and write being spelled w r ight because misspelling.
Things was hysterical, hilarious.
Right, So are you following those people? It's a little confusing, I.
Think again, they thought this was witty and it was a huge trend. And finally, in eighteen thirty nine, March twenty first heads Off to Alan Walker read again for real pinpointed it. There was another etymologist that said he read must have spent hundreds of hours digging through tons and tons of physical newspapers, journals, private letters, and other documents. What that man did was absolutely astounding. And that guy Anatoty Lieberman, a linguist and translator of from the University
of Minnesota, was absolutely right. And what reed did he found the day when Okay was born?
Yeah, the very day, Because there was some trash talking going on. The aforementioned editor of the Morning Post, Charles Gordon Green, was trash talking with the Providence Journal Rhode Island editor and there was something about the There was a satirical citizens group called the Anti Bell Ringing Society in Boston.
The A. B. R. S. Green was a member.
The editor of the Providence Rhode Island Journal was making fun of Green, and they were kind of going back and forth. And what happens at the end of this exchange.
Green says all correct, but he spelled it O K as an O L L K O R R E C T. He abbreviated, purposely misspelled and gave birth to O K.
That's right.
So this in this case it was a lowercase with periods little dot, little k dot.
And this might have actually.
Gone away again as well, even though it started being used a little bit in these penny rags. But along comes another coincidence with Martin van Buren, the eighth President of the United States, was running for re election. I believe he was from the small town of Kinderhook, New York, and like Andrew Jackson and Old Hickory, he took on the nickname Old Kinderhook.
And then what happened, well, that became his campaign slogan, Okay is okay, Old Kinderhook is okay. And by this time, this is the eighteen forty presidential election. He lost to William Henry Harrison. I died in thirty days, but the okay managed to live on as exactly the meaning that we use it for today. Like Okay, that's great, and it's actually evolved. I think they meant it much more enthusiastically.
Like he is okay, right, but.
The linguist, well, I guess he's the late linguist Alan Metcalf. I think he really did a great job at getting to the heart of what okay does. Now we don't we can use it enthusiastically. Sometimes when we do that, we're using it actually sarcastically or telling somebody to get off our back. But more often than not, as Metcalf pointed out, it's neutral, right, And he really got to it when he kind of I should say, he nailed it on the head when he when he identified it as neutral.
Right, yeah, but an affirmative neutral, So it's an affirmative.
It affirms.
It's a reply that affirms something, but not with any kind of enthusiasm.
Right, So he was saying like it filled a void. Yeah, and avoid that we didn't even know we need it because you could do the same thing. You could affirm something in the positive with yes, good, fine, excellent, all right.
Mah wasn't around yet, I guess.
But all of those say not only yes I'm affirming this, but yes, I say I think this is actually like a good thing or a positive thing. It has some venear to it. Okay is basically just like copy. I got it. I know what you're saying, Yes, go ahead and do that. I'm not saying I think what you're doing is great. But if you're asking me for permission, I just gave you permission with just okay. And that's
just one use of it as being neutral. But I think that's a that's a great I think that was a lot of great insight.
He had no totally.
If you're wondering about okay A why lowercase? There are different rules oka A why came after O dot k dot. But if you're a writer, they you know, writers use things called style guides if you write for newspapers or like when we used to write for HowStuffWorks dot.
Com, we what did we use? Do you remember? We used? Ap?
So ap uses uppercase, ok no periods. The Chicago Manual of Style, which is another popular one, uses both. They usually capitalize okah and periods are not necessary but acceptable Grammarly, for their part, says okay.
When you.
Know, uppercase ok for the beginning of a sentence, but lowercase ok a y otherwise and if you're wondering. Overall, they found that uppercase ok is used about a third of the time, and edited writing and okay ay about two thirds of the time, which surprised me because I never ever write or type out okay ay.
Oh I do. That's what I use the most.
Oh capital okay for me, baby, It.
Seems aggressive to me, so I tend to shy away from that.
Well, yeah, because now that capitals have taken on a meaning of like you're yelling at something.
Exactly, they're hostile. So a little lowercase okay and that auy just adds a little extra like hug on to the end of it.
I like it, all right, I'll consider it.
What I want to know is how many people are going to write in about your entomology joke oh okay.
I don't know if you Probably few far less now.
Though, someone just stop typing there, I are.
Well, since Chuck just referenced somebody stop typing. Obviously, short stuff is out.
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