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  • There's a two-letter word that we hear everywhere.

  • OK. ♪

  • OK. ♪

  • OK, are you OK, Annie? ♪

  • OK, OK, OK, OK ladies... ♪

  • OK might be the most recognizable word on the planet.

  • - OK! - OK.

  • It's essential to how we communicate with each other and even with our technology.

  • Alexa, turn off the living room light.

  • OK.

  • You probably use it every day, even if you don't notice it.

  • But what does OK actually mean?

  • And where did it come from?

  • - Uh, OK. - OK, then.

  • OK, thank you.

  • "OK" actually traces back to an 1830s fad of intentionally misspelling abbreviations.

  • 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".

  • But thanks to a couple of lucky breaks, one abbreviation rose above the rest: OK, or "oll korrect".

  • In the early 1800s, "all correct" was a common phrase used to confirm that everything was in order.

  • Its abbreviated cousin started going mainstream on March 23, 1839, when OK was first published in the Boston Morning Post.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Van Buren's supporters formed OK Clubs all over the country, and their message was pretty clear: Old Kinderhook was "oll korrect".

  • The campaign was highly publicized and turned pretty nasty in the press.

  • His opponents ended up turning the abbreviation around on him, saying it stood for "orful konspiracy" or "orful katastrophe".

  • In the end, even a clever nickname didn't save Van Buren's presidency.

  • But it was a win for OK.

  • That 1840 presidential campaign firmly established OK in the American vernacular.

  • And while similar abbreviations fell out of fashion, OK made the crossover from slang into legitimate, functional use, thanks to one invention: the telegraph.

  • If we lower the bridge, the current flows to the sounder.

  • At the other end, the current energizes an electromagnet and this attracts the armature.

  • The armature clicks down against a screw and taps out a message.

  • The telegraph debuted in 1844, just five years after OK.

  • It transmitted short messages in the form of electric pulses, with combinations of dots and dashes representing letters of the alphabet.

  • This was OK's moment to shine.

  • The two letters were easy to tap out and very unlikely to be confused with anything else.

  • It was quickly adopted as a standard acknowledgement of a transmission received, especially by operators on the expanding US railroad.

  • 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".

  • OK had become serious business.

  • But there's another big reason the two letters stuck around, and it's not just because they're easy to communicate.

  • It has to do with how OK looks.

  • Or, more specifically, how the letter K looks and sounds.

  • It's really uncommon to start a word with the letter K in Englishit's ranked around 22nd in the alphabet.

  • 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.

  • The idea was that modifying a word, like "Klearflax" Linen Rugs or this "Kook-Rite" Stove, for example, would draw more attention to it.

  • And that's still a visual strategy: We see 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 Bostonian origins were already mostly forgotten, and newspapers began to debate its history, often perpetuating myths in the process that some people still believe.

  • Like the claim that it comes from the Choctaw word "okeh", which means "so it is".

  • Choctaw gave us the word OK; va... ♪

  • OK's beginnings had become obscure, but it didn't really matter anymore; the word was embedded in our language.

  • Today, we use it as the ultimate "neutral affirmative".

  • OK, then.

  • OK, then.

  • - Learn to truly love yourself. - OK.

  • OK, get yourself up here!

  • OK!

  • I don't know what to say.

  • Say "OK".

  • OK.

  • It's settled, then.

  • 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.

  • If you "got home OK", it just means you were unharmed.

  • If your "food was OK", then it was acceptable.

  • And "OK" confirms a change of plans.

  • It's sort of a reflex at this point; we don't even keep track of how much we use it.

  • Which might be why OK was arguably the first word spoken when humans landed on the moon.

  • Not bad for a corny joke from the 1830s.

  • All right, guys, cut it out.

There's a two-letter word that we hear everywhere.

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