On this date in 1840 "The O.K. Club" was organised as a new Democratic political group. Here are 10 things you might not know about the expression “OK”.
The association with the Democrats dates back to the 1840 presidential election when their candidate for re-election was Martin van Buren, a native of Kinderhook, New York. His nickname, therefore, was "Old Kinderhook", and "Vote for OK" was snappier than using his real name.
It can mean a number of things including approval (“That document is OK to send out”), agreement (“OK, I’ll do that”) or indifference (“It wasn’t great, but it was OK”).
It has been described as the most frequently spoken or written word on the planet.
The origins of the term aren’t clear, but the most generally accepted explanation is that is came about as a result of a fad for misspelling things in Boston in the 1830s, and it originally stood for "oll korrect" ("all correct").
That’s only one possibility, though. It might have a Native American origin, as there’s a common Choctaw word, "okeh" meaning "it is so". Christian missionaries to the Choctaw used it often in Choctaw translations of The Bible. Or it might have come from Africa. Some African languages have a word sounding like “kay” which mean something akin to "yes indeed". Or did it come from the Scottish “och aye”? Or the Greek “óla kalá”, meaning "all good"?
A variant of it is “A-OK” which dates back to a 1952 advertisement by Midvac Steels which read "A-OK for tomorrow's missile demands". It became popular a decade later when NASA started using it during the launch of Alan Shepard's Mercury mission in 1961.
There’s a hand gesture which symbolises “OK”, in which the thumb and index finger touch, forming a circle, while the other fingers are held straight. In the English speaking world the gesture means the same as the spoken word, ie approval or agreement, and is a recognised gesture in scuba diving to denote that everything is fine. However, caution needs to be exercised when using it elsewhere in the world. In Japan, the gesture represents a coin and therefore means money; in France it means zero, or worth nothing. In some places it’s obscene or insulting. In Germany, the Middle East and parts of Latin America it can mean “you are an asshole”, while in other parts of the Middle East it represents the evil eye and is used as a curse or a threat.
In 2010 South Indian film director Upendra Rao made a movie for which the OK gesture was the actual title. Rao intended that the audience would interpret it however they wished, assuming they would take it as “Zero” or “Three” or perhaps associate it with a similar hand gesture in Buddhism called the Vitarka Mudra. Audiences, however, largely assigned it the title of “Super”.
OK! is a British weekly magazine specialising in royal and celebrity news, first published in April 1993.
OK is used in computer dialogue boxes. It generally means that the user can press the OK button to accept the message and continue. When the dialogue box contains only one button, it is almost always labelled OK. When there are two buttons, they are most commonly labelled OK and Cancel.
Character Birthday
Tex Vendetta, real name Alexander Vendetta, a member of the Vendetta gangster family based in New York. He is the second of Carlotta Vendetta's seven sons. He is a big country and western fan and has a penchant for dressing like a cowboy.
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