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There's a two-letter word that we hear everywhere.
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♪ OK. ♪
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♪ OK. ♪
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♪ OK, are you OK, Annie? ♪
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♪ OK, OK, OK, OK ladies... ♪
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OK might be the most recognizable word on the planet.
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- OK! - OK.
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It's essential to how we communicate with each other and even with our technology.
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Alexa, turn off the living room light.
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OK.
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You probably use it every day, even if you don't notice it.
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But what does OK actually mean?
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And where did it come from?
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- Uh, OK. - OK, then.
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OK, thank you.
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"OK" actually traces back to an 1830s fad of intentionally misspelling abbreviations.
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Young intellectual types in Boston delighted those in the know with butchered coded messages such as KC, or "knuff ced"; KY, "know yuse"; and OW, "oll wright".
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But thanks to a couple of lucky breaks, one abbreviation rose above the rest: OK, or "oll korrect".
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In the early 1800s, "all correct" was a common phrase used to confirm that everything was in order.
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Its abbreviated cousin started going mainstream on March 23, 1839, when OK was first published in the Boston Morning Post.
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Soon, other papers picked up on the joke and spread it around the country, until OK was something everyone knew about, not just a few Boston insiders.
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And OK's newfound popularity even prompted a flailing US president from Kinderhook, New York, to adopt it as a nickname during his 1840 reelection campaign.
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Van Buren's supporters formed OK Clubs all over the country, and their message was pretty clear: Old Kinderhook was "oll korrect".
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The campaign was highly publicized and turned pretty nasty in the press.
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His opponents ended up turning the abbreviation around on him, saying it stood for "orful konspiracy" or "orful katastrophe".
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In the end, even a clever nickname didn't save Van Buren's presidency.
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But it was a win for OK.
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That 1840 presidential campaign firmly established OK in the American vernacular.
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And while similar abbreviations fell out of fashion, OK made the crossover from slang into legitimate, functional use, thanks to one invention: the telegraph.
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If we lower the bridge, the current flows to the sounder.
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At the other end, the current energizes an electromagnet and this attracts the armature.
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The armature clicks down against a screw and taps out a message.
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The telegraph debuted in 1844, just five years after OK.
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It transmitted short messages in the form of electric pulses, with combinations of dots and dashes representing letters of the alphabet.
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This was OK's moment to shine.
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The two letters were easy to tap out and very unlikely to be confused with anything else.
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It was quickly adopted as a standard acknowledgement of a transmission received, especially by operators on the expanding US railroad.
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This telegraphic manual from 1865 even goes as far as to say that "no message is ever regarded as transmitted until the office receiving it gives OK".
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OK had become serious business.
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But there's another big reason the two letters stuck around, and it's not just because they're easy to communicate.
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It has to do with how OK looks.
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Or, more specifically, how the letter K looks and sounds.
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It's really uncommon to start a word with the letter K in English ⏤ it's ranked around 22nd in the alphabet.
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That rarity spurred a "Kraze for K" at the turn of the century in advertising and print, where companies replaced hard Cs with Ks in order to "Katch" your eye.
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The idea was that modifying a word, like "Klearflax" Linen Rugs or this "Kook-Rite" Stove, for example, would draw more attention to it.
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And that's still a visual strategy: We see K represented in modern corporate logos, like Krispy Kreme and Kool-Aid.
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It's the K that makes it so memorable.
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By the 1890s, OK's Bostonian origins were already mostly forgotten, and newspapers began to debate its history, often perpetuating myths in the process that some people still believe.
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Like the claim that it comes from the Choctaw word "okeh", which means "so it is".
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♪ Choctaw gave us the word OK; va... ♪
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OK's beginnings had become obscure, but it didn't really matter anymore; the word was embedded in our language.
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Today, we use it as the ultimate "neutral affirmative".
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OK, then.
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OK, then.
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- Learn to truly love yourself. - OK.
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OK, get yourself up here!
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OK!
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I don't know what to say.
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Say "OK".
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OK.
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It's settled, then.
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Allan Metcalf wrote the definitive history of OK, and he explains that the word "affirms without evaluating", meaning it doesn't convey any feelings, it just acknowledges and accepts information.
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If you "got home OK", it just means you were unharmed.
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If your "food was OK", then it was acceptable.
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And "OK" confirms a change of plans.
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It's sort of a reflex at this point; we don't even keep track of how much we use it.
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Which might be why OK was arguably the first word spoken when humans landed on the moon.
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Not bad for a corny joke from the 1830s.
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All right, guys, cut it out.