OK: Konspicuous, Kurious, Komical

By Allan Metcalf. At last it’s March, a month to celebrate the arrival of spring and the anniversary of America’s greatest word. On March 23, three days after the vernal equinox, comes the 176th anniversary of the birth of that word: OK.
Among the many unusual qualities of OK is the fact that we know exactly when and where it was created, thanks to the indefatigable research of Allen Walker Read of Columbia University. It came from the pen and the newspaper of Charles Gordon Greene. On Page 2 of the Saturday, March 23, 1839, issue of the Boston Morning Post, in a complicated, humorous story about a boisterous bunch of Boston young men making a sailing trip to New York City, possibly returning via Providence, R.I., Greene wrote:
“. . . perhaps . . . he of the [Providence] Journal, and his train-band, would have the ‘contribution box,’ et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.”
In other words, OK was born as a joke, a double misspelling of the initials of all correct. It was laughable. More...