NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWS: … You can still find people arguing online that OK derives from Choctaw or from Andrew Jackson’s bad spelling, but Metcalf duly relies upon the dust-settling scholarship of Allen Walker Read, whose extensive reading in 19th-century newspapers established that the first use of OK in print, in The Boston Morning Post of March 23, 1839, was a joke: “o.k. — all correct.” Such misspelling-based abbreviations were a fad. An earlier effort, “o.w.,” for “oll wright,” failed to catch on, whereas OK has gone globally viral. Even before OK became a fixture on computer screens, “okay” leapt readily to lips around the world.… (more)
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