Why do thoughts enter one’s head? Usually, I have no idea. But about “OK” I do.<\/p>\n
I’ve been deeply involved in a studious perusal of European police series on my current streaming service, MhZ. They’ve affected my life in certain ways. For one thing, I’m convinced I will never learn Danish, Swedish, Norwegian or Finnish. With one exception — the word “Okay,” or “OK.”<\/p>\n
Every fictional cop in Europe uses it. Thus, so do all the European scriptwriters.<\/p>\n
When a cop is interrogating a witness or suspect, he\/she responds to what is being said, no matter how bizarre, with “OK.” When a call comes in about, oh, say, a murder, one cop says (according to the subtitle), “We’ve got to go!” and her partner responds with, “OK!”<\/p>\n
A few days ago, I eschewed the potentially hopeless task of learning why “OK” has become a universal expression, but decided to find out how it became one. Because, if you think about it for six seconds, you’d realize that “OK” is not by itself a word. Not in any language. It is used as a word everywhere but what is its derivation? Probably not Greek or Latin. Maybe Aramaic?<\/p>\n
So I pulled my Random House Dictionary of the English Language off the shelf, consciously providing myself with a smidgeon of upper body exercise (it is very very heavy), and looked “OK” up.<\/p>\n
The definitions ran to many paragraphs — Random House was hyper-diligent here — but at the end I learned the derivation. It’s all because of…Martin Van Buren!<\/a><\/p>\n What, you ask? So why isn’t the expression “MVB” instead of “OK?”<\/p>\n Because Van Buren was born and died in Kinderhook, New York<\/a>, and was called “Old Kinderhook,” maybe affectionately, maybe not. (Would I care to be called “Old Manhattan?” I doubt it.) But if you wanted to greet him or refer to him, saying “Old Kinderhook” was unwieldy so, like so many text abbreviations today (OMG, etc), Old Kinderhook was reduced to “OK.”<\/p>\n How “OK” came to be used as a shorthand semi-agreement, I do not know. It’s hard to grasp why a cutesy reference to America’s 8th president became an indeterminate oral punctuation.<\/p>\n Still, it’s kind of cool, isn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why do thoughts enter one’s head? Usually, I have no idea. But about “OK” I do. I’ve been deeply involved in a studious perusal of European police series on my current streaming service, MhZ. They’ve affected my life in certain … Continue reading