Okay, okay
Ton amour est plus que okay
Et c’est okay okay
—Lyrics from “Okay,” by Nigerian artist Limoblaze
Someday, medical science will identify the bone in the heads of callow youth that causes them to abuse the language.
“Generations weaned on smartphones and social media think they invented initialized slang, which is totally bogus.”
Rizz? Cheugy? Yeet? Colorful, maybe, but it ain’t English. Slang has always been a mania of the young. It’s a not-so-secret code that helps define a generation. A private joke shared by millions, a non-confrontational rebellion, a perpetual aggravation to old fossils trapped in the brick-hard sediment of conventional vocabulary. Slang is the fluid tongue of time, place and circumstance, which is precisely why it usually has a limited shelf life.
Nobody’s ginchy anymore, and almost nothing is groovy. Excellence isn’t gnarly, repugnance isn’t grody, and most people would probably be hard-pressed to use hella in a sentence. Gadzooks went out with ruff collars and codpieces, more’s the pity. Tubular died young and is not missed.
Other slang has proved more durable. Speed freaks have been burning rubber since the 1950s. Getting hassled by The Man has been a bummer since the 1960s. Space cadets are still out to lunch, and being made in the shade remains awesome, bitchin’ and fab. Cool has done particularly well for itself, possibly more common today than at any time since it gained slang status back in the 1930s. There’s another word, though—a bizarre contrivance, a nonsensical farce, that far surpasses all others, slang and standard alike, in popularity, persistence, plasticity and prevalence. It’s a common word, something you say around the house every day. You probably said it five times before lunch.
The most egregious form of slang is the initialized kind. Not-words like IMHO, FOMO, ICYMI and ELI5 are comprehensible only to those who already know what they mean, which excludes a lot of Gen X and nearly all Boomers, which is most of the point. Generations weaned on smartphones and social media think they invented initialized slang, which is totally bogus.
Thanks to the scholarly researches of American etymologist Allen Walker Read, we now know that arcane abbreviations date back at least to the 1830s, specifically to Boston, where bored young wits thought it would be a stone-cold scream to take a simple phrase (no use), horribly misspell it (know yuse) and express it with initials (K.Y.). By this unaccountable formula, “all correct” became “oll korrect” became “O.K.”
Sound stupid? It was and is, and O.K. would have soon gone the way of K.Y., O.W., O.G. and headless portraiture had it not popped up in a handful of New England newspapers including the Boston Evening Transcript, the Boston Morning Post and the New York Evening Tattler. Buckets of ink by no means, but it raised O.K.’s profile just high enough to catch the attention of Martin Van Buren’s presidential campaign.
“Okay works as a noun, a verb, an adjective and an adverb.”
Publicly associated with his hometown of Old Kinderhook, NY, the staid and stuffy 55-year-old candidate needed to whip up some quick hip-cred, and his handlers figured younger voters would dig a geezer who dug their lingo. Quick as a wink, the country was awash in banners and buttons proclaiming “Old Kinderhook is O.K.” By the time Van Buren was elected 8th President of the United States, the coffeehouse spoof had graduated from complete poppycock to common parlance.
Impressive? Meh. Lots of nonsense gets into the vernacular. By the dawn of the 20th Century, however, O.K. had proven itself so useful it was de-initialized, and was well on its way to becoming the nation’s most popular export. Wherever American English has gone, okay has gone with it, finding a forever home within virtually every foreign tongue from Arabic to Afrikaans, from French to Filipino, and from Pidgin to Portuguese, effortlessly seducing the reluctant with its snappy simplicity and astounding utility. Okay is quite probably the single most spoken word on the planet. Russians typically use okay to end a conversation. To the Chinese it’s a strong affirmative. In modern Hebrew it indicates adequacy. Malaysians often emphasize okay with “lah,” as in “okay-lah,” as in “it’s totally okay, dude.” If there’s such a thing as a universal word, it’s okay.
Here in its homeland, it can mean just about anything we want it to. Okay works as a noun, a verb, an adjective and an adverb. A creature of context, it can signal approval, acknowledgement, permission, transition, even suspicion. Okay is by turns expository, interrogatory, accusatory, revelatory and celebratory. A perfect clay, it can be sculpted into all sorts of nuanced shapes by artful inflection. Say okay and you’ve said a mouthful.
If you’re wondering how a snotty little acronym grew up to become the greatest American success story of all time, you’re not the only one. After all, a plus-sized language like English contains no shortage of words that mean the same thing(s) as okay—words like yes, fine, allow, mediocre, and so forth. The best explanation deep-thinking linguists can come up with is okay’s casual disinterest. Okay describes the world in the simplest possible terms—a thing is okay, or it isn’t. It doesn’t judge. Okay permits us to express acceptance without venturing an opinion. You can throw it out there without putting anything out there. O.K. conquered the world with indifference.
Hipster initialists are still churning out strings of gibberish hoping to strike the next l’acronyme immortel. Unlikely contenders to OK’s improbable crown include OP (original poster), SMH (shaking my head), ROFL (rolling on floor laughing) and DIFTP (do it for the plot). It’s hard to feature any of those asinine abbreviations muscling their way into Mandarin, Macedonian or Mandinka, but that won’t stop the bone-headed young from trying.
Okay, okay, se non ti va
Lo sono qui, tu balli la
Okay, okay, se non ti va
Lo resto qui, tu resti la
—Lyrics from “Okay, Okay,” by
Italian artist Pino D’Angio
