Why we say ‘OK.’ How tea shaped English slang. Poetry winner
Grammar Girl: For Writers and Language Lovers.
Mignon Fogarty, Inc.
4.5 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1065. Is it "OK" or "okay"? We look at the surprising history of one of the world’s most recognized English words and how a 19th-century election campaign helped it stick. Then, we have some fun with Victorian tea culture and the many idioms it inspired, from Cockney rhyming slang to "scandal broth."
The "tea" segment is by Karen Lunde, a former Quick & Dirty Tips editor and digital pioneer who's been spinning words into gold since before cat videos ruled the internet. She created one of the first online writing workshops, and she's published thousands of articles on the art of writing. These days, she leads personal narrative writing retreats and helps writers find their voice. Visit her at ChanterelleStoryStudio.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Grammar Girl here. I'm Inion Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we're going to talk about the word okay, Victorian idioms about tea, and then I have the National Grammar Day Poetry Contest |
| 0:23.2 | Winning Poem. Very exciting. March 23rd is officially OK Day, as in yes, okay, one of America's |
| 0:33.1 | most successful language exports. And like many official days, it's the brainchild of a person with both |
| 0:39.8 | a passion and a reason for wanting some attention. In this case, Alan Metcalf, the late-esteem |
| 0:46.0 | linguist who wrote an entire book about the word titled, Okay, the improbable story of America's |
| 0:53.7 | greatest word. And why March 23rd, you might ask? |
| 0:58.4 | Well, that's the day the word okay first appeared in the Boston Morning Post in 1839. |
| 1:05.9 | The biggest question about okay is usually how to spell it, okay or okay-a-y. |
| 1:13.8 | And the origin of okay is one of my favorite stories, and to me it makes the two-letter spelling the purer form. |
| 1:22.3 | Here's what happened. |
| 1:24.1 | Much like the text messaging abbreviations of today, okay was an abbreviation for a funny misspelling of the phrase all correct, O-L-L-L-K-O-R-R-E-K-T. |
| 1:37.3 | Journalists at the time seemed to have loads of fun making up these off-kilter insidery abbreviations. Those Boston journalists at the |
| 1:47.2 | Morning Post are credited with creating OK, two letters, and according to the Oxford English Dictionary, |
| 1:54.7 | the OKA-Y spelling didn't appear until 1895 in an Australian publication based in Sydney called The Bulletin. |
| 2:05.6 | And in case you want even more spelling options, in 1919 H.L. Mencken wrote about Woodrow Wilson |
| 2:12.4 | using the spelling O'K-E-H, but that one didn't stick. |
| 2:18.3 | Journalists in the 1830s came up with other odd abbreviations like this, too. |
| 2:23.7 | They had O-W for All-R-R-R-R-G-H-T, a misspelling of All-, and NS for Nuff said. |
| 2:35.0 | But OK stuck while the others fell into obscurity |
| 2:38.7 | because President Martin Van Buren, whose nickname was Old Kinderhooks, |
| 2:44.4 | because he was born in Kinderhook, New York, |
| 2:47.2 | abbreviated old Kinderhooks into OK, |
... |
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