I watch a fair number of foreign movies and TV shows, both those originating in other English speaking countries as well as some from countries that speak a different language.

I’m frequently surprised at how many references to American culture they contain. Perhaps it’s not that much of a surprise in the English speaking countries, as places like Canada, the UK, and New Zealand certainly import a fair amount of movies and TV shows from this country.

Still, it always takes me by surprise when I’m watching, say, a police procedural from Denmark and all of a sudden I hear an English phrase like “love at first sight” in the middle of an otherwise Danish speech.

And in the midst of all this Americana, there is one item that always sticks out, perhaps the single most popular word that America has contributed to the world.

That word is, of course, “OK”.

It seems to be universal, or nearly so.

For the longest time I had been under the delusion that “OK” originated from the presidential campaign of Martin Van Buren whose nickname was “Old Kinderhook”.

Nope.

His campaign helped to popularize it, but that was not its origin.

In The Hilarious History of ‘OK’ the origin is traced back to the 1820s:

Despite plenty of space, there was an abbreviation fad in newspapers of the time that might remind one of our own time. Perhaps a friend has sent you an electronic message containing brb, for “be right back”? Or maybe you’ve assessed an article as TL;DR? Let us present for comparison the 1839 New York newspaper report of a fashionable young woman remarking to her male friend “O.K.K.B.W.P.”: her alphabetic litany was answered with a kiss and reported to translate as “one kind kiss before we part.” Take that, Internet.

The 1820s and 1830s shared another linguistic fad with today: an appreciation for deliberate misspellings. (Kewl, rite?) This trend, which had humorists adopting now-cringey bumpkin personas with ignorance manifested in uneducated spellings, turned no go into know go and no use into know yuse (lol). Abbreviations were not immune, and no go became K.G.. So too all right became O.W., as an abbreviation for oll wright. And all correct became o.k., as an abbreviation for oll korrect.

BTW, I grew up using the OK hand signal all the time, and I can’t tell you how annoyed I am that it has been perverted into a symbol of white power.