By Allan Metcalf. Exactly how it became the utilitarian sign of approval and agreement, not to mention the two-letter summation of American pragmatism, is too complicated to explain here. You can find the details in my OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, based on the research of Allen Walker Read, the great historian of American English.
As the book explains, there is no doubt that the Boston Morning Post of March 23, 1839, is the true origin of OK — though its popularity has inspired lots of alternate theories giving it a more dignified beginning. More...

By Allan Metcalf. For 177 years, ever since OK was born on Page 2 of the Boston Morning Post on March  23, 1839, OK has been a favorite of politicians. Within a year of its birth, Martin Van Buren, running in vain for re-election as president, was supported by OK Clubs. The initials referred to Old Kinderhook, since he was from Kinderhook, N.Y. More...

By Allan Metcalf. If you’re running for president, as half a dozen candidates are doing these days, you need money, you need meetings, you need enthusiastic supporters — and last but not least, you need slogans. Right. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. Nineteen fifty-four, the year of my birth,* witnessed Brown v. Board of Education, Elvis Presley’s first successful  song, mass testing of the Salk polio vaccine, Hank Aaron’s first major league baseball game, and the coining of the word nowheresville. That last is according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s new Birthday Word Generator, linked to the date when OED researchers have been able to locate the first usage of a term. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. Not long ago, I attended a conference at Radcliffe on “Ways With Words: Exploring Language and Gender.” The first, and perhaps most salient, thing to note is that this conference was packed. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. I first heard the word in an Elvis Presley song, “In the Ghetto,” released not long after the Billy Joe Royal song “Down in the Boondocks.” I remember comparing the lyrics. “And his hunger burns,” Presley crooned of his “hungry little boy,”

so he starts to roam the streets at night
and he learns how to steal and he learns how to fight
In the ghetto

Billy Joe Royal’s boy was no less poor but more hopeful, counting on love and hard work to move him from the “boondocks” to a place “on the hill.”
I think I understood, then, that Presley’s boy was black. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. Like others in this forum, I try to keep abreast of changes in idiom over time. We notice the emergence of vocal fry, the increasing acceptance of singular they, and so on. But for the most part, our observations are those of the disinterested listener. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. I spent part of spring break serendipitously immersed in language. We were on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica (the “Rich Coast,” as Puerto Rico is the “Rich Port,” neither of which description seems apt these days), among a group of international visitors. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. Facebook was in the news last week for introducing a choice of five emoji you can use to tag a post or other online object that inspires some emotion in you. Formerly, your only recourse was the thumbs-up icon of the Like button: You could tag an item to say “Like!,” which might mean you agreed with it, you were amused by it, you were moved emotionally by it, you hope others will look at it, or any number of other things. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. Sometimes (in fact quite often) Mark Liberman says things at Language Log that make me want to paint them on the side of the barn. More...