Have you ever wondered what the ubiquitous phrase "O.
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K." means or what its origins are? Ginandtacos.com was recently observing a thread on the Electrical Audio message boards in which dozens of people were posting dozens of increasingly silly postulations, some even taking the form of assertions, about its meaning and origin. As the duty of setting the matter straight fell upon me, ginandtacos.
com would like to share this information widely as a public service.
Where did "O.K." originate? Like most things that are great about America, it came from…..the 8th President, Martin Van Buren.
Van Buren's other popular phrase – "Well, fuck my petticoats!" – never caught on.
Yes, one of our irrelevant Presidents contributed the only phrase (aside from possibly "Coca-Cola", depressingly enough) that exists untranslated in every spoken language on Earth. You see, ol' Marty was known to his closest associates by his nickname, "Old Kinderhook" – a reference to his birthplace and home town. An obstinately lazy man, Van Buren approved White House documents not by signing his name but by scrawling "O.K."
The phrase, which struck the White House staffers as inherently memorable and sonorous, was adopted as an all-encompassing positive. It spread through Congress quickly and, by the end of Van Buren's first year in office (1836) it had filtered out to most of the country. Unlike most slang expressions that disperse and evaporate quicker than flatulence in a wind tunnel, the term became a permanent fixture in the American lexicon and eventually, aided greatly by the first World War, the entire world.
Van Buren was also, as seen above, the first President (chronologically) to be photographed. Some historians claim that John Quincy Adams (the sixth President, while Van Buren was the 8th) was photographed shortly before his death, but no evidence remains to support the claim.
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Ginandtacos.com – your one stop shop for Van Bureniana.
Liz says:
Etymology AND presidential history?! YUM.
*fans self*
Schneider says:
Just to clear this up, the OED says you're basically correct…probaby:
"ORIGIN probably an abbreviation of orl korrect, humorous form of all correct, popularized as a slogan during President Van Buren
Ed says:
The OED can eat my balls. The idea of the phrase being shorthand for an affirmative expression from an Esperanto-like slanguage has been debunked.