Having an OK day

March 23rd is more than just an OK day. It's The OK Day. It's the day that marks, as far as anyone can tell, the first appearance of the term OK in print. (It was handwritten as early as 1815 in the diary of William Richardson, near a big ink blot where he had erased something, but appearing in print, well, that's when an expression has really arrived.)

OK...so what's the full story? Well, it began with a researcher in 1960s wondering where the term could have originated. It has spread like wildfire through dozens of languages...but what's the origin?

The researcher, an etymologist named Allen Walker Read, read the March 23 1839 edition of the Boston Morning Post, in which Charles Gordon Greene reported on a trip taked by a frolicsome group called the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society:

The "Chairman of the Committee on Charity Lecture Bells," is one of the deputation, and perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train-band, would have his "contribution box," et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.

Apparently, those goofy revelers in the late 1830s thought it was quite funny to misspell words--"oll korrect" indeed.

There are other explanations:

Greek railroad workers in the United States, some say, marked checked-over merchandise or workmanship with the initials of όλα καλά (all good).

It's a borrowed term from the Choctaw, whose okeh means, well, OK.

Three African languages use similar-sounding expressions. Wolof and Bantu have waw-kay and the Mande have a phrase o ke.

I like the idea that it's a misspelling. Why? Because the unlikeliest explanations, in matters of language, are often the best ones. I've worked as a journalist for decades, and old-school journalists routinely and deliberately mess up spellings.

In manuscript form, the articles you read in the New York Times or other old-media wood-pulp-based information packages have their various bits tagged. Compositors (the people who used to slide lead letters onto a printing frame) would tag headlines as HED. Decks (subheadlines) were tagged DEK. And missing bits that the reporter or editor needed to fill in were tagged TK for To Kome.

The theory was that misspelled words would shine out like beacons to everyone in the production line and they'd never make it through to print that way. That's the theory. I remember the day I picked up a copy of a certain computer magazine to find a TK tucked away in a sidebar.

Now the laughs we had at that editor's expense made for a really OK day.