Made In America - Bill Bryson [48]
For a long time the most American of Americanisms, OK, fell resoundingly into this category. The explanations for its etymology have been as inspired as they have been various. Among the theories: that it is short for only kissing, that the semi-literate Andrew Jackson wrote it on papers as an abbreviation for oll korrect (in fact he was not that ignorant), that it came from Orrin Kendall crackers, that it was an abbreviation for the Greek olla kalla (’all good’), that it was from a prized brand of Haitian rum called Aux Cayes, that it was an early telegraphic abbreviation for open key, that it was from the Choctaw affirmative okeh, that it came from the Indian chief Old Keokuk or from the nickname for Martin Van Buren, Old Kinderhook (he was from Kinderhook, New York).
Learned papers were written in defence of various contentions. The matter was discussed at conferences. By 1941, when Allen Walker Read, a professor at Columbia University, began looking into the matter, OK was already the most widely understood Americanism in the world and the search for its origins was the etymological equivalent of the search for DNA. It took Read some twenty years of searching to nail the matter down, but thanks to his efforts we now know that OK first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839, as a jocular abbreviation for ’Oll Korrect’. At the time there was a fashion for such concoctions – KY for ‘Know Use’, RTBS for ‘Remains to Be Seen,’ KG for ‘Know Go,’ WOOOFC for ‘With One of Our First Citizens.’ In 1840 Martin Van Buren ran for President, the Democratic OK Club was formed to promote his election, and OK raced into general usage, where it has remained ever since.10
As well as creating new words by the hundreds in the nineteenth century, Americans also gave new meanings to old ones. Fix and its offshoots accumulated so many uses that the Dictionary of American English needs nearly seven columns of text and some 5,000 words to discuss their specifically American applications. They added prepositions to common verbs to give them new or heightened significance: to pass out, to check in, to show off, to beat up, to collide, to flare up, to start off, to stave off, to cave in, to fork over, to hold on, to hold out, to stay put, to brush off, to get away with. They cut long words down – turning penitentiary into pen, fanatic into fan, reformation into reform – and simplified constructions, preferring to graduate over to be graduated. They created nouns from verbs – dump and beat, for example. Above all they turned nouns into verbs. The practice began as early as the late seventeenth century (to scalp, first noted in 1693, is one of the earliest) and continued throughout the eighteenth, but reached a kind of fever pitch in the nineteenth. The list of American verb formations is all but endless: to interview, to bankroll, to highlight, to package, to panic, to audition, to curb, to bellyache, to demean, to progress, to corner, to endorse, to engineer, to predicate, to resurrect, to notice, to advocate, to splurge, to boost, to coast, to oppose, to demoralize, to placate, to donate, to peeve (backformed from peevish), to locate, to evoke, to rattle, to deed, to boom, to