Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - "O.K."

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why "O.K." is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Hey folks, this is Alex. I'm of course here with Katie. Hey Katie. Hey. Hey. Hey. And I don't even know if we necessarily need to do this, but here's the thing. Let's do it. No, no, no. It's good. It's good. It's good. Yeah. This is the only episode of the show, like taped prior to the 2024 election and releasing after the 2024 election. So the main things we want to say are that we love

each and every one of you. Yes. And also that the tone of our voices and vibe will not be reflective of anything that happened in the news. Yeah, I think we're both feeling a lot of care and concern right now. And I know for me, at least I've been, it's not that I've been trying to bury my head in the sand or anything, but I do think it is important to, you know, give yourself a mental break if you can, right? Like if that is afforded to you.

And so that's, so I really hope that this does help. And, but yeah, I mean, I also just really want people to know that we are thinking about everyone and we really do, really do care about y'all. Yeah, same here and worldwide. And like you said, I do feel like this podcast tends to be a break from this thing. So I hope this is, and this episode, it's, it's a listener suggested topic of okay, as you'll hear. The like one thing to mention is that one of the takeaways is about Martin Van Buren and to the 1840 presidential election. It

truly has nothing to do with this one at all. But as we'll say on the show, we mentioned a president and we don't know how the election went. So that's the closest this comes to anything, Newsy, is a guy from nearly 200 years ago. I'm actually going to take a political stance against Martin Van Buren. He sucked. Good. He stinks. So that's what's going on. And I also posted about this on Discord too. Please come find community there if you want to, but either way, we care about you and thanks for hanging out. Here's this episode about OK. OK, known for being a word, famous for maybe being a phrase.

Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why OK is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt. I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie.

Yeah. What is your relationship to or opinion of? Okay. It's all right. Yep. It's the correct definition. It's all right. Yep, it's the correct definition. It's good. Good job.

Let me turn that question around on you, Alex. What is your preferred okay? Is it just okay? Is it okey-dokey? Is it okay? Is it okay? Yeah, I think I say the standard, okay, the most. And my other favorite one from comedy is Larry David going, okay, okay.

Okay. Okay. But I don't like do that. That's his thing. You know, in Italy people say, okay, but they go, okay. Okay. So now I've started doing that. Okay, okay.

Oh, that's amazing. Now I want to do that. That's a good one, right? Let's all do that. Yeah, there's a lot of different flavors. Okay, okay, okay. It's all right, it's okay. When I tried to do it,

I think it sounded a little bit Borat, so maybe I won't do that. But the way they do it is great. That's good. My wife. My wife is okay. Remember when we all said that? When we all said my wife. And thank you so much to at dben dt on the Discord for suggesting this, because it might be one of

the most stiff topics ever. We all, I think even in other languages, use this word due to American globalization of culture. Like, okay is understandable basically everywhere on earth. And we never think about why or how we use it or anything. And we have a set of fascinating numbers and statistics to share about OK. And this week that is in a segment called... I want my numbers, stats, numbers, stats, numbers, stats, numbers, stats.

I want my numbers, stats, numbers, stats, numbers, stats, numbers, stats. C-POD numbers and stats. All right. Thank you. Yeah. And that name was submitted by at Hunter Pope on the discord. Thank you, Hunter Pope. We have a new name for this every week. Please make a Macillion Wacking event as possible. Submit through discord or to sifpotatgmail.com. Alex has

a great range. So really, you know, lean into that. Yeah. Soon I'll soon I'll be doing operatic stuff. It's going to be great. It's going to be going to be very Italian. You'll probably fit right in with it, Katie. You probably know most of the operas by now. Yeah. Give us some Puccini. Puccini. Yeah. That's not Puccini.

Okay. Okay. Right. And this week, most of the numbers are at the end of the show, but we have a few to start. The first number is at least five. There are at least five different grammatical uses of OK. Ooh. There are five ways to use it in a sentence as a part of speech.

Okay. Wow, I just did one. Oh my God. Did you hear that? Just super grade school grammar parts of speech stuff. You can use okay as an adjective, as a verb, as a noun, as an adverb, and as an interjection. Okay, I don't know what any of those things are. All five of those ways. Yeah, and we all kind of abandoned this after being forced to do it in school. One of the very fun things about making SIF is that it will often turn out there is an entire book about what feels like a pretty specific episode topic.

And someone sourced this week is a book called, Okay, the Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word. Wow. Yeah, there's, I read a book about just the word OK. I bet it's thrilling. I bet most of the reviews like I bet if you go on Goodreads all of the reviews are going to say it's OK. It's really begging for a lot of very funny three out of five star reviews.

Yeah. It's OK. It's OK. It's an OK book. Yeah. So yeah that's an adjective though right. Saying like it's OK. It's okay. It's an okay book. So yeah, that's an adjective though, right? Saying like, it's okay or I'm okay. That's like an adjective that's saying that you're fine. It's just fine. That's right. And probably the two ways we use it the most are adjectives and interjections because, yeah, adjectives, we just are constantly describing things as okay. We're describing a thing, an adjective. Okay is also a verb because you can okay something. You can okay an idea or any

subject of the verb. The third way is a noun. Okay can be something that you give. Like, I give this my okay. There's also a past bonus show about a brand called Okay Soda that coined the idea of okayness. That's another sort of noun version of this. Fourth part of speech is an adverb. Adverbs, I know this is flashing everybody back to English class, but adverbs are words that modify a verb. They describe the qualities of a verb. And okay is one of the few adverbs that does not end in the letters l-y.

For instance, you can say, I took it okay. And when you say, I took it okay, okay is describing the way you took it. Yeah. Alex jumps okay. I do. That's actually pretty accurate. I don't think you've even seen me jump. But for a tall guy, I jump okay. Maybe I have. You don't know what I've seen, Alex. So yeah, that is also a pretty frequent use is the adverb. And then the fifth major usage is the sort of specific part of speech of an interjection. And this might be...

Okay, wait, I'm going to stop you right there. That was just me doing it. That was an interjection, okay? Hey, I'm interjecting at this. Yeah, and that might be one of the richest uses of okay, because it can be to interrupt, it can be to round off a topic, it can sincerely mean I'm really on board with what you're saying, it can mean I'm kind of not on board with what you're saying but I'm not totally willing to say that. It has so many different forms as an interjection. Yeah, it's sort of it's sort of like dude or like where it has many different flavors of it, because you can say, hey, OK,

like in a positive way, like, OK, OK, I'm on board. Or you can be like, OK, OK, OK, like, like, stop. I get it. I get it. You know. Or it can be to express skepticism, like, okay. There's just so many different, it's really interesting how many different meanings you can get across with one word, with just sort of a change in your tone,

the way you're saying it, how long you're sort of lingering on the vowels, how much you're repeating it, things like that. Exactly. And I'm glad you brought up dude because that's a great comparison for how flexible okay is. Dude is a very flexible interjection and not many other meanings. It can be a noun, that's about it. Okay can be so many other words and ways of using a word in a sentence. It's almost a perfect word in terms of how many situations you can use it in and ways you can use it.

You know, it's funny when I started podcasting, I realized how much I say okay, just to let someone know that I'm listening to them. I will just kind of nod and say, okay, okay, yeah. And when I'm editing my podcast, it's the worst possible thing I could do because it's so annoying, as a listener, it's annoying to just listen to someone going like,

oh yeah, okay, yeah, okay, okay, okay. I think in normal conversation, it's not grating because if you are the one being listened to and someone's saying, okay, you can kind of tell, you can see their expression, you can see their expression, you can tell what their tone is, that they're not actually impatient,

that they're just interested in what you're saying. But on a podcast, I think sometimes without the other context clues of, it might just come off as me being impatient, like I'm done with you talking right now. I'm just going to say, okay, until you shut up. So that's why I now sort of edit out or have self edited me saying, okay, a lot in podcasting. That is true though. It is a very positive word to me. It has done so much in so many

conversations to either confirm that you're paying attention and present or confirm that you're on board with what they're saying. It's really a societal glue. You know? It's great. Good job. Okay. But it's wild because it can also mean the exact opposite, Alex.

I could be talking to someone and their eyes could be glazing over and they could be going, okay, okay, okay, like impatiently. And it can mean the exact opposite where someone really wants me to shut up and they're letting me know by saying okay a bunch of times. Yes. Or like that when Larry David says it a couple of times, it's after the funny bit where he and the other person squinted at each other and there's suspicious music for like a while. And then he disengages in a way where...

Da da da da. Yeah. Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. And when he says, okay, a couple of times after that, what he means is, I don't believe you, but I can't prove it right now. Yeah. Exactly, exactly.

It's beautiful. Okay. Exactly. Exactly. It's beautiful. Okay. Okay. Okay. I should, I'll link a clip if people don't know that cube enthusiasm thing. It's great. Yeah.

But yeah, so this is such a rich element of our lives. And the other number before takeaways is two letters or four letters. Because professional writing style books conflict over whether to spell okay with two letters or four letters. You can even put more O's in there and make it longer if you want, in my opinion. Okay. Oh yeah, and of course there's the angry text message of just the letter K, where you're

so mad there's not a note. So passive aggressive. If you put, there's like both K, where it's like, I'm a little pissed. There's K period. And if you see that, you know, you done effed up. Our relationship is over. Right. Yeah.

It's over. It's over. Breakup, divorce, friendship ended. You're fired. You're gonna go to jail. It's the worst thing you could receive. Yeah. Like, don't turn on your car ignition because it's gonna be one of those car bombs from the Godfather. Like, it's done. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No, you get a text like that from the Godfather. You're finding like a horse head, a sheep head, a whole barn full of animal heads in your bed the next day. I've never understood. There's also KK, which I've never quite understood it. I think it might be short for Okie Dokie, but when I see it, it sounds terse to me and I don't like it.

I'm totally open to being wrong. I read that as terse, but still casual and not angry. Like it's sort of internetty. Like, yes, yes. You know, like it's not mad, but it's like terse quick. OK, OK. Yeah, I think I agree. I think I agree with that. But I'm always not exactly sure about that. And that's there's so many interesting qualities with all these, right? Like, that's the internet kind of coined an okay that is very terse but very not mad at the same time, which is such a needle to thread.

You know, it's so interesting. And now we just have a thumbs up that we use, which I read as okay in my head. I use it that way all the time. Yeah. Especially two thumbs ups. Yeah. Like it's legitimately okay, but there's not more to say. Right. Yeah, sufficient. And then looking at like style books and journalism,

the probably two biggest style books are the Associated Press Style Book and the Chicago Manual of Style. Most journalism outlets use one or the other for their rules on basic spellings punctuation, and they disagree on okay. The Associated Press spells it with just the letter O and the letter K and with no punctuation. There's not periods. And then the Chicago Manual of Style spells it with the letters OKAY. I'm sure people are very familiar with both those.

Those aren't surprising. Not to be mean to Chicago, but why does Chicago get to have a say in this? I don't know. I guess that would be a good CIF topic, but maybe too inside of the world of journalism. I don't know why Chicago has a manual of style and the other one is for all of the associated press. That seems like a rebellion by Chicago. Yeah, Chicago just going like, nah, I don't like it. Don't like it. I'm gonna change it. Is that Al Capone's voice?

I don't really know how to do Chicago. I just go right into Al Capone. That's not okay to me, she. If people want to hear an extraordinary capturing of the Chicago accent, watch the actor Oliver Platt in the TV show The Bear. He just inhabits 50-year-old or older-year-old dudes from Chicago in a way I have not seen in media before. It's really cool. It takes a lot of self-restraint to not make a bears joke right now because I feel like that's played out and hacky and disrespectful. So I won't do it, but I do want to let you

know that I'm a good person for avoiding that temptation. Cause that's the cartoon one. And that also has a relationship to reality. Oliver Platt is doing such a realistic one. It's wild. And he's not from Chicago as far as I know. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. But anyway, that's just for people who want to learn my culture. So the Chicago press, they, they will like the longer version, right? OKAY, whereas the Associated Press, is it just OKAY or is there any punctuation? There's no punctuation? Yeah, Associated Press, it's just the letters O and K. There's not punctuation. And you might have apostrophes for like OKAYed or OK okays, you know, these like verbi versions,

but just the basic okay, no punctuation. I see. And then which came first? That's the amazing thing. The first version is the letters O and K with punctuation. So it's different from both of these manuals. The first ever usage is that way. Is it short for something then? Is it a shortened version of like what Omnicron Kappa or something? Some sort of uh... Right it's from the ancient Greeks. I don't know. Yeah they said should

Athens go to war with Sparta? Okay Omnicron Kappa. Okay. Yeah Omnicron Kappa to know. Yeah, they said, should Athens go to war with Sparta? Okay, I'm Macron Capita. Okay, okay. I'm Macron Capita to that. Yeah, I'll make a Capita or whatever. Yeah, those old Italians. Okay, okay. Yeah, the origin of this is our amazing takeaway number one. Okay comes from a confusing joke in a Boston newspaper making fun of a Providence, Rhode Island newspaper.

That's perfect. I love that so much. I almost don't want you to explain it to me more. I kind of just, it's like, yeah, it's Boston making fun of Providence. Perfect. That's so American. The thing with OK is there's a dominant theory where we're going to treat it as the origin just because we need a better theory to come along to unseat it. The dominant theory is that a newspaper article in the Boston Morning Post in the year 1839 coined OK in pretty much the way we use it today. And it's not the abbreviation you would expect. We'll talk about what it abbreviates. I'm excited. It's got to be some insult towards Providence. So I want to know.

What they told those, what they told those Rhode Island bastards. Again, this is 1839. So we'll be able to say exactly what this joke is going for, but also it's an old enough joke that it's not funny and it's extraordinarily confusing. It won't feel like it makes any sense. I'll be the judge of that, Alex. I used to live in Boston. That's true. You were over in Cambridge, Mass.

There you picked up the local inscrutable cultures. That's right. Yeah. I had a Boston police officer stomp around my dorm room once. Oh no, really? Yeah. No, it was great because someone knocked on my window. I was on the third floor and there was a knock on my window. I found that curious because again, I was on the third floor.

And so I looked out and then there's like someone there is like, what's up? And he was like, oh, sorry, nevermind. And like kind of scampered off. Oh my God. I think it was just some kid who was looking for a friend, but I just told the resident tutor like, hey, there's some guy out there.

I just wanted to let you know. I think it's probably just some kid who's looking for someone, but I just thought I want to let her, you know, and she's like, Oh, I should call the police. I was like, please don't. I think it's maybe okay not to. And so she's like, no, I'm calling the police. And so the police officer like, sort of like, like came in my room and immediately it was like, all right, ma'am, that's a problem. And like was very, very Boston police and like really annoyed with me, even though I didn't ask for him to come to my dorm.

And he's like, you know, what's the problem here? What, you got a burglary? What's going on? I'm like, no, no, it was just some guy knocked on my window. He's like, you know this guy? I was like, no, I wouldn't have. No, I don't know this guy. Said like, I don't know this guy. Is he out there? It's like, no, he's not out. What do you mean? He's not just like standing there.

And he's like trying to open the window. I was like, sir, please, it's locked. Just if you let me unlock, he's like, ma'am, I can handle this. And he rips it open and the lock just comes Right off so he breaks the window It's in the middle of winter. He looks around outside like I don't see anyone I Neither do I sir All right, well nothing I can do ma'am just

You know keep your window locked." And it's like, you broke my window. Anyways, so I'm excited to hear what the brilliant minds of 1830-something Bostonian people came up with to insult Providence, Rhode Island. Can I? I just want to acknowledge that that story, there were a few very unsettling dimensions, such as a person on a ladder and a window, but it really was leavened by how dumb everything

that police officer did. He walked all over my bed too. Like he walked in his boots on my bed because my bed was next to the window. And he's like, let me move the bed. Let me move the bed. And he's like, unnecessary, ma'am. And just walked on the bed and with his Herculean strength destroys the window, the very window, keeping me safe from the potential intruder.

Right. And like, Oh, there was a creep at this window many hours ago. I'll investigate by checking if they remained at the window for many hours through you calling the police. Yes. And also, let me emphasize, I did not call the police and I was treated as a very hostile person who was trying to waste the time of this police officer. Alex, you can cut all that if you want. I don't know how relevant that is. Well, I feel like it's relevant for how much weirder Boston was in 1839. Because here's the thing.

Even weirder, huh? We're going to get into less probable theories of the origin of OK. The most probable theory was discovered in the mid-1960s by an etymologist at Columbia University. His name is Alan Walker Reed. Several sources bring him up. Sources here include the book, The Vulgar Tongue, Green's History of Slang, that is by lexicographer Jonathan Green. Also, a piece for Smithsonian magazine and a piece from the Paris Review. They all say that Alan Walker Reed dug this up. In 1839, the Boston Morning Post, which is no longer an active newspaper, they published an article that was intended to be comedy and part of a few different weird newspaper trends of the 1830s. So there's

1830s newspaper logic. I know I remember finding out that there's a lot of weird little newspaper stuff. They used to publish short stories and things in the newspaper and was not sort of like the news is now. Maybe there was more entertainment stuff in there. Yeah. yeah, there are three trends here. The first trend is comedy writing centered on bumpkin type characters. Oh, yeah. Your medium is just text, and so you're doing misspellings

and goofy phrasings as comedy. That's one trend. In other mediums, radio can do funny sounds, TV can do funny faces and pictures and stuff. You just have to write words wrong in a newspaper. So that's one trend here. The second trend is that newspapers would mock each other openly. They would insult each other, and that was a big thing among the different regional newspapers.

That's fun. I like that though. Yeah, it's fine. Washington Post should just print stuff like New York Times, more like the new Dork Times. Am I right? All three of these trends I'm going to describe are dead, but newspapers insulting each other happens a little bit with British tabloids and with absolute bottom barrel American papers like the New York Post.

No one should read the New York Post. It's cred and don't read it. But then the third trend here is wacky abbreviations and slang. Individual papers would develop lexicons of specific slang that only they do. The closest modern version is the Hollywood newspaper variety, where they have funny old timey slang for Hollywood business. This was what basically every newspaper did in the 1830s. One weird example is the acronym W-O-O-O-F-C. Woof-sic. W-O-O-O-F-C. Woof-sic.

It stood for with one of our first citizens, which means like an anonymous leading person from a leading family of the city. It'd be for a lot of gossip. Like one of our leading citizens was in a brothel or a bar or something, you know. It's like an oomphy on Twitter. One of my friends. Wait, how does that even stand for oomph? One of my friends. I don't know what the IE is. Yeah, it's a lot like internet slang where it's like, who can keep up? Right.

So these three trends create okay. Again, the trends are bumpkin comedy voices, newspapers mocking each other, and abbreviations. All right, I got it. The three ingredients. With our powers combined, we create a newspaper in the 1830s. Yeah. And so on March 23rd, 1839, the Boston Morning Post runs an extraordinarily confusing comedy article. The first they describe a real organization that was also satirical is called

the Boston Anti-Bell Ringing Society. In real life, the city of Boston passed a real ordinance against loud dinner bells. And then a group of people in Boston did a satirical organization like making fun of that serious ordinance. Like, why would you have an anti-bell ringing ordinance that's dumb? It was like a parody. Yeah. Well, I do agree with that. But how loud were these dinner bells? Because they might have had a point. Was this people's own private dinner bells? Or was this how – in what situations were these dinner bells being rung? Just like the family dinner bell?

We don't know. This is like a clear record of a confusing thing. It's really weird, but it just existed is all we know. Because if someone had like a church bell that they installed in their home and like clang it every time they were hungry. That might get annoying. It would. Yeah. Like if it's the bell for chow at camp or something, but it's in the middle of Boston, that would be annoying. Yeah. Yeah. So it could be that. We don't really know because there's many layers of people being goofy. I think I'm team anti-bell. Anti-bellum.

Antebellum. This is antebellum about antibells. And so the Boston Post says, let's write a comedy piece about the comedy group, about the real ordinance. So it's very confusing. They joke about what if the real satirical Boston anti-bell ringing society went to the other cities of the Northeast and went to New York, went to Providence. And so then in a very inscrutable way, the Post jokes about the rival Providence Journal

newspaper attempting to write about the fake phenomenon about the satirical real group. I'm so lost, Alex. You don't need to understand what's going on. I'm so lost, Alex. You don't need to understand what's going on. I'm so lost. Okay, so there's- You don't need to know any of this. So it starts out with a real ordinance against ringing your dinner bells too loud. Then one newspaper writes about a fake satirical society against the bell ringing ordinance?

Yeah. One newspaper writes about a real satirical group and then imagines a real newspaper failing to cover it effectively. Okay. So they're like imagining the group going on tour and then imagining a rival newspaper failing to do a good job covering it. Okay. And this doesn't work as satire because there's so many just completely fake things. When The Onion writes an article, they don't say, unicorns are mad at the flubity flu. That's not anything, right?

You have to only do one joke. That's a great Onion headline, Alex. Oh, thank you. Now I'm really curious about this flubity flu and why the unicorns are mad at it. I used to contribute onion headlines in real life. Maybe I should just find the email and see if that one will go through. Just shoot it over there out of nowhere. I'm back.

Ta-da. There you go. But so in this just completely wonky satire piece, the Boston Post imagines the Providence Journal writing an article about this, and then the Providence Journal's editors review this reporting and they call the reporting OK. At last, we've reached OK. And this is O period K period. All right. What does that stand for? And in the joke, the Providence Journal's editors use the acronym OK to mean all correct. The words all correct for OK. This brings in the country bumpkin trend. I see. It's funny because it's spelled with an O for all and a K for correct

because these dumb, stupid imaginary people can't spell good. I can't imagine making a living or a career out of writing, say, incorrectly spelled words for a fictional character that's kind of stupid. I would never do that. Oh. I certainly wouldn't do it on Twitter.

Yeah, bird, right. Not as a bird, no. But this is like if you opened the Pro Bird Rights account and just started slapping your hands on your keyboard with no artifice or skill at all. Yeah. Comedy was just a lot more poorly written in the 1830s. And so people were like, this is an amazing joke. This is such a funny concept from the Boston Morning Post. We love it.

Well, they had just invented the joke like 10 years earlier. So, you know, go easy on them. Right. A guy with a forage accidentally made a piece of metal that just says joke and he's like, Oh, like that's, I knew it was. His name was Henry joke. Yeah. And so this newspaper writes this and we don't have like super specific stats or dates for the progression, but in general, this slang takes off and this joke takes off. Other newspapers copy it and it grows in American society. And that extremely weirdly specific situation of a Boston paper joking that all correct would be spelled okay

by the Providence people is the origin of okay, we're pretty sure. What a low bar for humor. I was born in the wrong era. I would be a genius comedian back then if I wasn't a woman. Yeah, although next week's episode, we will talk about an influential female magazine editor from around this time. So there were a few women in media. Oh, seriously?

That's exciting. Yeah, I'll save it for next week. But yeah. She was able to do something even with a womb. That's nuts. I know. It's astonishing. But this one, we do think it's specifically a guy because the Boston Morning Post had recently been founded by Charles Gordon Green, who still edited it. If anybody created OK, it's that guy, this guy in New England. He was from New Hampshire originally. He also created GG standing for Gordon Green, which is now used for Gordon Green when you're gaming.

That's right. It's like when you want to tell someone they played a good game, you say Gordon Green, but then you shorten it to GG. The one other thing to say here is that this theory is pretty likely because in the mid-1800s, newspapers and especially cheap newspapers were a surprisingly dominant source of slang. They actually could spark trends in language and slang and jokes more than you would expect. And amazingly, we're able to cite a scholarly source from that time about it. Jonathan Green says that in 1872, a scholar named Maximilian Schiele de Vera published a book about American slang called Americanism's The English

of the New World. And this guy was a Swedish immigrant who was a professor of modern languages at the University of Virginia. He was like an actual scholar. And in his book he says that there's a few sources for American slang. There's Britain, there was new white communities in the West, there was onomatopoeia, new ideas. But quote, the most fertile source of Canton slang is beyond doubt the low-toned newspaper and that thanks to this influence, any sudden excitement, political events or popular literary production originates and sets a going a number of slang words, vulgar at first and rejected by the few who are careful of the people's English, but soon adopted as semi-respectable." I feel that is somewhat similar now, right?

In terms of you get a bunch of internet slang that pops up and everyone makes fun of it because it's often associated with sort of the youth and it's like, oh, these dumb kids online coming up with slang and then everyone starts using it. Even your grandmas. Yeah. Even your grandmas. Yeah, like I think many Americans are aware of the phrase, Hawk Tuah. And some of them even know what it means. And there's not any good reason for that. Yeah.

Other than this is always how our culture is worked. So that's a good reason. It's about a bird of prey, right? Yeah, you're a hawk rights activist, right? You want hawks to Tua as they wish. It's a raptor duo. Two Hawks? It's a type of Pokemon.

Right. Two Hawks. It's a two hawk kind of Pokemon. It's like Doug Trio. Yeah. Two Hawka. Yeah. Two hawk. Yeah. Hawk to evolved into Bit Taka.

There you go. And so this theory makes sense as an origin of okay, even though it seems very obscure and specific. And the other fun code to this is that the Boston Post went out of print in the 1950s. The Boston Herald in particular kind of ate up their subscribers. But the Providence Journal that was on the end of the joke is still in print. 2029 will be their 200th anniversary. So Providence, Rhode Island still has that paper. Do they still spell things really bad?

I would kind of love it if that was actually like a legitimate criticism and they just can't. Yeah. Prav-o-dance? Darn it. You know? So that's probably where OK comes from. And then there is a leading alternate theory that only had a fringe impact on it. Because takeaway number two, the leading alternate theory about the origin of OK, claims that Martin Van Buren was super popular. Yeah, that doesn't sound right to me. I'm not a presidential scholar, but that doesn't pass the smell test. Yeah, one of the fun things about American history is a lot of those dusty,

old timey presidents were about that popular in their time, too. It was like, I guess that's a guy was kind of their situation. And Martin Van Buren, even though he was the president, was kind of not all that popular as president. Van Buren basically rode Andrew Jackson's cult of personality into one term as president. Van Buren basically rode Andrew Jackson's cult of personality into one term as president. He was the eighth president of the United States and followed Jackson. And there's two key sources here. There's a history book called Martin Van Buren and the American Political System by Donald B. Cole of Phillips Exeter Academy,

and then digital resources from the Library of Congress, including a political cartoon. One note about the tone here, this is me and Katie's very last taping before the 2024 election. So you listening will know what happened, we don't. That's just why we aren't bringing up the results of it. We don't know yet. So this will be entirely separate from all that. I just bring it up because I don't want you wondering why we don't say the big news

you know about. The very different thing of Martin Van Buren. Today he's basically a set of factoids. Other than being the eighth president, he was the first president born after the American Revolution and he was the first president from New York. He was born in 1782 in Kinderhook, a place like an hour north of me if you drive a modern car in New York State. So he's like an East, one of these young East Coast elite zoomers of the time.

Yeah, and the United States had not invaded a West Coast really yet. So I like the idea that they would call him East Coast. There's the East Coast and the, I don't even know what other coast there is. Just the coast. But then the relevance to OK here is the set of nicknames for Martin Van Buren. His main nickname is not related. His main nickname was the Little Magician.

Sorry, can you, what, can you explain that? Was he little and did he do magic tricks? It's because he was considered little. He was relatively short, even by the size of Americans at the time. Cute. A little itty bitty president. His magic is that he would consistently win elections or gain power without ever being very popular.

He just seemed to keep locking into positions because he was a New York State Senator, New York's Attorney General, US Senator, Secretary of State, the very important post of ambassador to the United Kingdom, and a term as vice president. And it was all relatively accidental. There was never like this ravenous fan base for Martin Van Buren. So he's not a short king, but a short democratically elected president. And I'm going to link a political cartoon from the 1840s where he's depicted as a little magician summoning spirits out of his tobacco pipe and surrounded by a circle of symbols on the floor.

It's great. That's actually rad. That's actually really cool. That's pretty good. Being just like, hey, I'm the little magician. And then you throw some sand and a plume of smoke engulfs you and then you've got a bill passed. And the peak of his magic is becoming the president basically by just being associated with Andrew Jackson. He was only vice president for Jackson's second term. He got the job by being

much more of a yes man than the first guy. And according to Donald Cole, the Democratic Party won that election by running on everything except Martin Van Buren. The focus is his nicknames here because again, he is a little magician in his career, but he was just around so long people came up with other nicknames. And his second most popular nickname was the red fox of Kinderhook. Okay. Was he a redhead? He, as a young man, had reddish blonde hair. And then the fox meaning is basically the magician meaning and then Kinderhook is the town he's from and just a fun name. All right. Well, you know, that's, I guess that's kind of a neat nickname. And then we get to the letters okay here because he ages out of the nickname. His hair turns gray

and he balds. So he's not a red fox anymore, right? Right. Is he a silver fox? Like Anderson Cooper? Legitimately, I think silver Fox was not in the lexicon. Otherwise they would have just switched to that. And so instead they switched to... What about, was Gilf in the lexicon then? Or Pilf? Van Buren's, I would like... The modified nickname was Old Kinderhuck.

You know, because he's an old guy from Kinderhuck. That's it. Okay. Ah, I did it. Exactly. The abbreviation of old Kinderhuck is okay. That was the use of okay, where I mean to say, Alex, what the heck? And it's very important to know the timeline here and the Boston newspaper here because a lot of false internet sources will tell you that Martin Van Buren coined OK. Old Kinderhook was such a phenomenon that it popularized the letters OK. And there is one true fact that in the 1840 campaign to reelect Van Buren, some of his supporters formed OK clubs, like old Kinderhook

clubs. The clubs were referencing the slang meaning that the newspaper created. I see. But there's a myth out there that, oh, the old Kinderhook clubs created the concept of something being OK. It's really more like newspapers and vernacular created OK, and then a failed reelection campaign referenced it one time. Right. So yeah, so Van Buren, the theory that he would have

sparked a national okay trend that lasts almost 200 years later, is just really not plausible. Like he was a very unpopular president. There was a financial crisis this whole one term. He was never popular with anybody in a big way. It just doesn't make any sense. You can debunk that, folks. It sounds like there's some Martin Van Buren heads that are really trying to go with this propaganda that Martin Van Buren... It's interesting to me that people really want him to have that under his belt.

It seems like there's two main reasons people push that other than just not doing research, which is we didn't totally know about this Boston Post article until the 1960s. And the other reason is with all sorts of American things, which will especially come up next week because the topic is turkeys, with all sorts of American things, which will especially come up next week, because the topic is turkeys. With all sorts of American things, I think we want a history related or nobly sounding reason for where things came from. People claim that a civil war hero named Abner Doubleday invented baseball. But it was really just kids playing stickball and it turned into a sport.

So we want it to be a president and not just slang. Yeah, I can see that because trying to explain it, it's like, yeah, so, okay, listen, the dinner bells were really loud. Okay. Are you with me? The dinner bells were too loud. Right. So convoluted. And then going into, okay. And then they thought it'd be funny because they're like, you can't spell all right, all okay. Like what was it? All correct. That was it. They can't, they can't spell all correct.

So they spell it with an O and a K and everything. One thought that was really, really funny. You know, we do look, we're like looking down our noses at that, but remember the whole cat cheeseburger era where it was like the cats going like, I can't has cheeseburger. And we're like, those cats are hilarious. So have we really changed Alex? Yeah, stuff has really confusing origins. And so now you get to know the origin of okay, if a better theory ever comes along, that's the new theory, but that seems to be where. So it's fun. It's a fun

meme that we created. Yeah. You know, I think that I'm very much in favor of the truth, no matter how weird and convoluted it is. So I don't need some kind of glorious origin story for okay. It's fine if it was just a bunch of newspaper writers high on opium coming up with some stupid joke. Yeah. And the truth is usually more interesting than this fake stuff. Like Martin Van Buren is just not that interesting. He really is our most okay-est president. He is okay in the negative sense. Like, okay, yeah. He's, you know, kind of fine, whatever.

And folks, that's two big takeaways and a few numbers. We have many, many more numbers to come after a quick break. I think that's okay. You never know what you'll learn more about on the Celebrity Trivia Show Go Fact Yourself. For over 150 episodes, we've welcomed guests like DJ Jazzy Jeff, Audie Cornish, and Andy Richter to tell us why they love what they love, and then get quizzed on it. And past quizzes have included some pretty unexpected topics like... Reverse painting The perfect flip turn while swimming Prince's house party playlist from that one episode of New Girl

And so much more! Plus, our guests meet surprise experts in their topics Like the time we met an actual celebrity cow So listen to Go Fact Yourself twice a month every month on Maximum Fun Do it for the cow! No! No! Hey, do you have a favorite episode of Star Trek? If you do, you should also have a favorite Star Trek podcast.

Greatest Trek is about all the new streaming Star Trek shows, and it's a great companion to The Greatest Generation, our hit show about back catalog Star Trek that you grew up with. It's a comedy podcast by two folks who used to be video producers, so it's The Greatest Generation, our hit show about back catalog Star Trek that you grew up with. It's a comedy podcast by two folks who used to be video producers, so it's a serious mix of comedy and insight that fits right into the Maximum Fun network of shows. And Greatest Trek is one of the most popular Star Trek podcasts in the world.

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Secretly incredibly fascinating listeners like you get 20% off the first year of their MonkeyPod subscription. Learn more by visiting their website, www.monkeypod.io slash sifpod. monkeypod.io slash sifpod. We're back and we're back with the rest of the episode being some more OK numbers. One number I'm not going to do details of is at least seven, because that's how many further theories I ran across for the origin of OK that are even less convincing than Martin Van Buren. There's just a lot of junk out there for where this came from.

So you can disregard it unless it's somehow way more convincing than the Boston Morning Post. Okay. I think the Perry Bible Fellowship, it's this comic. I love this comic. It's this comic. I love this comic. That's so good. He did one where it was just a little stick figure and it falls over and forms the word okay. I kind of forgot what the joke was, but I thought it was cute.

That's better than all these. Yeah. The absolute weirdest one is there's a theory in Germany that the saying okay comes from an abbreviation of a military rank called Oberst Kommandant. There's just absolutely no way that's true. That cannot at all be why Americans say OK. Like what? Come on guys. They're always like, oh, you like our military, right? Our neat little outfits and our cute little words we use. We're like, it's kind of the main military we don't like guys. Like it's, it's sort of the number one.

Why not? I don't understand. Have you ever tried our chocolate? What else could you be referencing in our beautiful German history? The chocolate is good. We like the chocolate. Oktoberfest! You like Oktoberfest? Liederhosen. What am I missing Alex? There's literally nothing else that I could be missing. So the next number here is 1963.

Right. Here in 1963. Groovy man, the 60s. That's when the US Postal Service, love them, they adopted the current system of two letter abbreviations for state names. So it's that recent, 1963, and bringing that up to talk about the abbreviation for Oklahoma, which is the letters OK.

Yeah, which is what Oklahoma is, you know, it's OK. That's a slogan about Oklahoma. Oh guys, come on. I'm teasing you, but guys, you gotta have a little more self-confidence there. Come on. Yeah, that's what they've covered out here, because especially in the 1960s and 1970s, that was printed on Oklahoma license plates. The words Oklahoma is okay. Oh, guys.

And they meant it in an upbeat way, but people did turn it around to mean the negative or average way. Yeah. It's just kind of like Millhouse. It's Millhouse vibes, right? It's very Millhouse. And his dad too. Like race car bed. Yeah. You know? Okay. Right. And his dad too, like race car bed. Yeah. Okay.

Right. Because before 1963, if you addressed mail to Oklahoma, the state abbreviation was OKLA. Really the 1960s began a lot of this association. The other big thing that began it is the musical Oklahoma, which was first performed in 1943. And the lyrics of the title song of Oklahoma, Call Oklahoma Okay, in the slang meaning and the positive meaning. Right. Oklahoma is okay, because it's just fine.

I remember that musical. Oh, what an okay morning I am having. It is okay in this state. I think the corn is just fine now, cause it's okay. At this height, it is okay to harvest it. Just a lot of farming tips. When the corn is as high as a standard Asian elephant's eye. That's our accuracy update of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Oklahoma gets that abbreviation, of course, not from the slang. And in general, we're pretty sure it comes from the language of Choctaw people, Choctaw native people who are still here. The Choctaw language of those native people, it's been transliterated into English and Oklahoma comes from two words and it puts together. And the word okla means a group of people. Okay. God, I keep doing it. I keep doing it, Alex. I can't stop. It's powerful, yeah.

So subconscious now. The other word in it I found actually conflicting sources. A lot of stuff like the Library of Congress says the word humma means red as in red skin or red dirt. But I also found blogging from Choctaw people that says that's a much more complex word and it also has meanings like courageous or brave or other honorifics. But whatever the words mean, it's a description of a group of people in Choctaw. And Okla is definitely a group. So it's just like accidentally related to the R slang word, okay.

I see. And so was this group of people in the region that is now known as Oklahoma or more spread around? All the above. And many native peoples were brought to the Oklahoma territory. I see. Which was for decades meant to be like a holding area for native people. And then white Americans said, we want that state too.

And so now it's all of the above. Because of people like Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, also known as the balding fox. I just imagined a hairless fox. That really freaked me out. I'm sad about their crimes, but the hairless fox is fun. Yeah, that's fun. Hairless foxes and coyotes is where we get our myths about chupacabras.

That's true. It's just coyotes and foxes with mange, guys. So yeah, so the state of Oklahoma has been accidentally associated with this slang joke from a Boston newspaper for a very long time. And the other number there is 2019. That's when Oklahoma Lieutenant Governor Matt Pinnell started a rebranding campaign for Oklahoma's slogans and plates. Oklahoma is okay has not been the unofficial slogan for many decades. And it's still so sticky that

Oklahoma is trying to find a brand that actively says Oklahoma is good. They still haven't found something more catchy. They should just do that. Oklahoma is good. more catchy. That is, they should just do that. Oklahoma is good. Right. Like the fun letters okay connection really holds in people's minds. It's going to take a lot to fight it. And maybe just bluntly saying Oklahoma is good or saying, no, it's good.

You know? It just, it should just be the governor on TV. You see a close up of his face and he's staring at you saying, Oklahoma is good. It is good. It's cut in like subliminal messages, like one frame at a time. Why don't they say it's Okie Dokie? Because that's cute. They could be like, Oklahoma is Okie Dokie. That could be like Oklahoma is okie dokie That would be nice. That's a better idea than anything. I saw in that article. Yeah, that would be great Katie for governor

The other number here sort of related to this is 1881 the year 1881 that is the date of a gunfight at the ok Corral And a lot of people have wondered why it's called the OK Corral. Some of them presumed it's related to the state of Oklahoma, but it's not. Is it because the corral is in nominal condition? In general, it's hard to find a lot of information about it, but for one thing, it's located in Tombstone, Arizona, so it's not in Oklahoma. But the Library of Congress says the name comes from Old Kindersley. And I would love it if people have more information on that because the prominence of the Martin

Van Buren theory of okay has kind of ruined the internet sources on this. Like the Library of Congress is fine, but most other blogs and the like AI search results that Google forces on me. Oh my God. I'll say that the OK Corral is named after old Kinderhook Martin Van Buren, which is definitely not true. Like why? Yeah. AI is sort of making, I mean like it is making some of these searches a lot more

difficult because it's like, like, OK stands for Owl Coop spelled with a K. And it's like, that can't be right. And it's like, no, see, here's an AI image of an owl. So that's not helpful. It's no help at all. But it's named old Tendersley. It might be a person or like a town name or something, but all we know is it's not Oklahoma. It's not the condition of being okay. It's just sort of a local name for this corral where gunfighters shot each other. I see. So, okay, corral. What was it? It was like a... Describe it. Yeah, it was simply a stable and livery. And it was apparently about half a block away from the gunfight. And so people just were looking for something to call this gunfight

where Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday and a couple of people shot at each other. And they picked this building with a catchy name. So this wasn't like a regular shootout spot or was it just that this very famous one occurred there? Mainly that a famous one occurred there. Yeah. I see. Okay.

And it's sort of a myth that there was a lot of gunfighting in the old west in general. That actually happened very rarely. I mean, if it happened at the rate that Westerns teach us, there would just be nobody left except for the old town prospector who was sitting out spitting his platoon going like, well, they got another one. And it's just the old, and then it's like, the only ones left is the old prospect and his mule, but then they get into a gunfight. I mean, the mule's a quick draw. He should have known, you know? Yeah.

Eight, two, claim and turn. Mule noise of satisfaction. I don't know what they sound like. One very last number for this main episode. The number is 1997. Okay. I was alive. I was alive. Me too.

And 1997 is the year when Radiohead, the band, released Okay Computer, their third studio album. Hmm. It was, I remember that song. It was sort of teaching us to not be afraid of computers. Like the computer's okay, it won't electrocute you, it won't come alive, and eat your thoughts. Don't worry. It's like that Lego movie song, like everything is computers. Yeah, exactly.

The name origin of the album is very interesting to me and very fun pop culture. So Radiohead started recording it at the end of 1996, and that was after a very lengthy tour promoting their album, The Bends. And a lot of the tour was long bus rides, and the band had entertained themselves with, among other things, Douglas Adams. Oh, hey. And the audio version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Wow, I listened to that when I was a kid, over and over again. I listened to the radio version of it before the books.

I read the books actually after that. And I remember when I got my first little CD player, like that was one of the things I would listen to on there over and over again. I just loved it so much. Yeah, and I think not everybody knows the novel is Douglas Adams adapting his radio play. It was initially an audio entertainment piece.

The books are great, but there's something about that radio play. I've always kind of been drawn to that and things like, you know, maybe that's why I like podcasting and podcasts so much, just that experience of having that kind of, you know, in your head conversation with someone. And I really wanted to be like part of a radio play or something. So yeah, that was, I was so into that as a kid. Wow, me too. I guess we've never talked about this.

Yeah, like nobody grew up wanting to be a podcaster because it didn't exist, but I was really into audio entertainment and comedy. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And I remember even as a real, like this is a slight tangent, but as a really little kid there was a sort of audio version of what was it? Like the magic flute and it was just sort of an audio play, right?

I was really into it and I loved those sort of like audio forms because it was, it was fun to sort of have it on while you would do other things and kind of be able to imagine these characters and yeah, I love that. And it's yet another thing people love about Germany. These Alperflote. Ah, yeah, nothing wrong with Germany. Tell you what. Yes, we have, you know, our alpine, our little alpine hats with the feathers.

There's nothing else in our history. Don't go looking around. Don't go sniffing around. Yeah, it might be German language and Austrian. Please don't correct me, folks. But anyway, yeah, so and Douglas Adams, yeah, this amazing audio entertainer, like especially 1996, there are not podcasts. You really only have audio books and radio plays. And so the band Radiohead is stuck on the bus.

They're listening to Douglas Adams Entertainment. And there's a part in the book where the spaceship's computer says that it is not capable of fending off incoming missiles. And then Galactic President Zafod Bebelbrox says, quote, okay, computer, I want full manual control now." And Tom York, the singer of Radiohead, heard that, ran with it as a title for this album. And the goal with the album was partly to capture technology and the alienation of modern life. York said they were trying to capture, quote, attempting to reconnect with other human beings

when you're always in transit." End quote. And so this statement from a galactic president who might die of incoming missiles felt like the right title for their album. That's interesting. Man, I didn't know that. And I was a big Hitchhiker's Gun to the Galaxy fan. I liked Radiohead, but I don't know, I was maybe not so plugged into that. I like both things a lot. I never knew they crossed over until looking into this. Yeah. So, yeah, that's where the title comes from.

And the word okay is the magic thing there. It can mean almost every emotion. And so it's very evocative in front of the word computer. It means the entire era. I think it's also kind of interesting because when we think about computers, right, they don't have that sort of, okay is a very human word because it has so much nuance that just depends on

what intonation or inflection you put into it. And whereas with like computers, like whenever Siri goes like, okay, it's like Siri, you don't, I don't know if you're being sassy with me or not because you're a computer and you're going like, okay, I can do that. And once I feel like we will know that we've reached the singularity once a computer, when you make a request

where you're like, find me picture of wombat butts. And then Siri goes, okay. Um, technically I can do that. Oh, I agree a thousand percent. Someday we'll get there. Until then, Siri finds me all the wombat butts I want. No questions asked. Future future sarcastic computers, please preserve our audio podcast.

Let's lodge that request now. Hey Siri, keep me going. My phone actually responded. What? What do you want? I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food.

I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food.

I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food.

I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. I'm gonna go get some food. Big Takeaways! Takeaway number one, OK comes from a confusing joke in a Boston newspaper making fun of a Providence, Rhode Island newspaper. Takeaway number two, the leading alternate theory about OK is based on Martin Van Buren being super popular. And along with those two very large takeaways, so many stats and numbers. About everything from the amazing grammatical flexibility of OK, to the state of Oklahoma, to weird other theories about it,

to the band Radiohead, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode, because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the bizarre legal battle over the name OK GO.

Visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show, for a library of more than 18 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fund bonus shows. It is special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include an entire book about OK, it's called OK, the Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word, that's written by Alan Metcalf, who was a professor of English at McMurray College in Illinois.

Also read The Vulgar Tongue, Green's History of Slang, that's a book by professional lexicographer Jonathan Green. Got Martin Van Buren information from the book Martin Van Buren and the American Political System by historian Donald B. Cole, who works at Phillips Exeter Academy. And then so many digital resources from the U.S. National Archives, the Library of Congress, the blogs and words of Choctaw people, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca.

I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, and others. Also KD taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free CIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life.

There's a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the discord and hey would you like a tip on another episode because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 93 that is about the topic of chocolate and fun fact there the founder of the Hershey Chocolate Company built a company town in Pennsylvania and a matching company town in Cuba. So I recommend that episode.

Also recommend my cohost Katie Goldin's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Un-Shavin' by the BUDOS band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that?

Talk to you then.