The internet is full of jokes father's and how they correspond. No matter what the son or daughter asks or states, no matter how many voice messages they leave, the answer is usually "ok."
Okay means that something has been acknowledged, that it is perfectly fine, acceptable, that we have agreed. It can also be ironic, in the sense of "ah, well, let's see", and when pronounced in a drawn-out way, it can mean "whatever he tells me".
When a person is not thinking, he would say that OK is the initialization of some logical, well-known phrase. But it didn't.
It started as a joke.
American linguists agree that the best explanation so far was given by Allen Walker Reed, professor of English at Columbia University, back in the 1960s.
He found the first written use in a Boston newspaper Morning post in March 1839. It was a joke, like a kind of mime of the time, which entered the newspapers from the streets.
Namely, OK was supposed to mean "oll korrect", which is a deliberate and grotesque misspelling of "all correct" - all correct, all correct, all as it should be.
There were more such jokes, but OK apparently survived because already the next year (1840), the eighth American president, Martin van Buren, was campaigning for re-election.
Someone figured out that Van Buren, instead of the name of his Dutch ancestors, advertises himself as "Old Kinderhook" because he is from the town of Kinderhook in New York state. It's abbreviated as OK, which meant to say that OK is okay, that is, that Van Buren is really good.
During the campaign, "OK clubs" sprung up all over the country in support of the candidate who, however, lost.
A wonderful little word
Okay remained and possibly the strongest export product of the English language.
"The word was great for print headlines because it's so short," Doug Harper, founder of the online etymology dictionary, once told NPR. "And it covers so much space in terms of meaning."
A miraculous word, one of the first spoken in communication with the moon. When, on a live broadcast, Neil Armstrong was preparing to take the famous "one small step for a man," headquarters in Houston said, "Okay, Neil, we see you coming down the ladder."
How to spell it correctly
In Serbian, "okay" can be a word, but also an adjective and an adverb, and in English it can be a verb. "The boss okayed it" would mean that the boss approved something.
Initialism is OK, because the initial letters of the words are taken, but each one is pronounced for itself, such as EU, NBA, RTS or the strong parties we have. This is in contrast to acronyms where the initial letters merge into a new word that is pronounced smoothly - NATO, FIFA, BIRN...
It is pronounced "o-kej", but there is confusion in English, just like in Serbian, whether to write "OK", "OK" or "okay", but it is generally accepted that anything is possible.
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