Martin van Buren, O “Old Kinderhook”
In the 1930s, the most common was to say that everything was fine, all over – All Correct. But two famous lyrics came to simplify the speech after some satire in the middle.
Who would say that such a simple word, one of the smallest of all dictionaries, could lead to such a complex story? “Ok” was already a joke, a symbol of a political campaign and is now considered a rude answer on social networks.
Its story began in the US, more properly in the expression “All Correct”, which in Portuguese means “okay”, or “all right.” Second on Instagram the linguist Marco Neves, 1930s of the nineteenth century There were among US journalists a fashion that consisted of playing with spelling errors and abbreviations.
One of them sounds familiar: ALRIGHT.Kbwp, who first appeared in a New York newspaper. This abbreviation, explains the Merriam-Webster dictionary in his own, appeared in the context of a young woman to ask her boyfriend “One Kind Kiss Before We Part,” “a loving kiss before we separate.”
Perhaps inspired by this loving abbreviation, a simpler came: “all correct“That the illiterate would write as they read, that is,“oll korrect“It is shortened with Ok. But this was just one of the thousands of abbreviations that existed at the time. Why was popularized until it became a universal word for almost every language in the world?
The secret was in policy. In 1840 Martin Van Buren applied for the US presidency. For campaign slogan, his supporters began to use an abbreviation for his nickname “Old Kinderhook”who had acquired due to his homeland, Kinderhook. To appeal to the vote in Van Buren, he then shouted “ok”.
A few years later, the word again made headlines, when an American newspaper decided to make a joke – again political – about the former president Andrew Jackson, who was known among the popular for not having great abilities regarding writing. To play with their ignorance, the authors of a column in this newspaper wrote that the president asked the secretaries to write “OK” (“Oll Korrect”) in the documents he signed.
The playful story has spread all over the world, and the rest of the story is known. Recently, we know that “ok” – – not a way to please a virtual interlocutor. “Ok” has gone from a term of generic agreement to a sudden response that requires more development. Walk where to walk the future of this word, you want to write ok, “ok”, or “okay”, is always all correct.
CAROLINA BASTOS PEREIRA, ZAP //
