What is Okay, anyway?
I was thinking about the notion of OK,
what’s that mean, really?
The state of Okayness seems mediocre — it’s a condition where things are simply “all right,” alright.
All is right? What’s rightness, a place of stability?
Who cares about that?
It’s too easy.
What my impression might be is that right is a condition of balance –
you’re right in the balance of your world.
Standing, for example, up-right.
I reached into a friend’s site,
to gather his impressions.
1839, only survivor of a slang fad in Boston and New York c.1838-9 for abbreviations of common phrases with deliberate, jocular misspellings (e.g. K.G. for “no go,” as if spelled “know go;” N.C. for “’nuff ced;” K.Y. for “know yuse”).
In the case of O.K., the abbreviation is of “oll korrect.”
Probably further popularized by use as an election slogan by the O.K. Club, New York boosters of Democratic president Martin Van Buren’s 1840 re-election bid, in allusion to his nickname Old Kinderhook, from his birth in the N.Y. village of Kinderhook. Van Buren lost, the word stuck, in part because it filled a need for a quick way to write an approval on a document, bill, etc. Spelled out as okeh, 1919, by Woodrow Wilson, on assumption that it represented Choctaw okeh “it is so” (a theory which lacks historical documentation); this was ousted quickly by okay after the appearance of that form in 1929. Greek immigrants to America who returned home early 20c. having picked up U.S. speech mannerisms were known in Greece as okay-boys, among other things.
The noun is first attested 1841; the verb 1888. Okey-doke is student slang first attested 1932.
So the idea of okayness is a kind of old expression, but still, correctness
has never been a Girvin trait.
I’ve been breaking rules since the beginning.
All correct, as intoned above,
would be all boring.
In that line of thinking, “Brake” rules might be an option.
More so, the idea of seeking the heart of the word, something that I learned in middle school, studying Latin, is the etymon.
The etymon, according to the Greeks, several thousand years back,
is the true meaning.
Look back, look in, look deeper.
That’s okay, besides what your
friends might think.
Dig in.
Know more
than what’s on the surface.
Tim | Los Angeles, CA
TIM
…..
G I R V I N | LOOKING FOR WOWNESS
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