Two letters and everything is correct
„o.k“ = Old Kinderhook = all correct
(Author : Markus Günther)
(Published in the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeriger” , newspaper for Cologne, Germany and its surroundings, January, 29th, 2004)
“Between North- and South Pole there are few words everyone understands. “Okay” is one of them. But where does it come from ? Its origin was until recently disputed.
The scholars agreed with that the origin of it seems to be in the USA and that the word came from the abbreviation “o.k.” . But for what does it stand ? Some said that it might have been a German immigrant named Oskar Krause or Otto Köhler who did quality checks of cars or machines and left his initials “O.K.” as a sign of quality behind, written with white chalk. [Note : That sounds very much like the assumed origin of the phrase “Kilroy was here” which is also said to come from a person performing quality checks with planes or aircraft, leaving the phrase behind as a sign that this part had been tested by him.] But these stories are seemingly free inventions.
The american scientist Allan Walker Read [what a fitting name !] has delivered the only plausible, but still curious explanation for it : In the thirties of the 19. Century , there was a kind of satirical way of making jokes with newspapers coming from Boston through abbreviating headlines and explain them in brackets placed behind them. Part ofe the fun consisted in putting mistakes into the abbreviations.
So in March 1939 the abbreviation “o.k.” was explained in this way by writing “all correct” behind it. The joke with it was, that writing “o” for “all” and abbreviate “correct with “k” wasn’t correct at all ! But the great popularity of this phrase came with Martin Van Buren, in his election campaign in 1840. After his town of birth Kinderhook in the federal state of New York [”Kinder” means in German “Children”] he had the nickname “Old Kinderhook”. Van Buren took the joke coming from Boston and made from the abbreviation “o.k.” a phrase for his campaign with a double meaning, standing for his nickname “Old Kinderhook” and at the same time for “all correct”. Suddenly in several newspaper articles and in election campain appearances the “o.k.” was used as his “trademark” , but also in the sense of “everything is correct” , “everything is good”. Van Buren lost the campaign, but his “o.k.” is even now a great success.
[Translation by Andreas Krämer]
