Columbia University

FOR much of his long career studying language Allen Read sought the origin of OK, perhaps the most useful expression of universal communication yet devised. You can use OK not simply to indicate agreement but, with appropriate facial expressions, shades of agreement, even disagreement. It is a vocabulary in itself. No wonder that OK has found its way into nearly every language in every country, and beyond. It was the fourth word, if you can call it that, heard on the moon, spoken by Buzz Aldrin. For etymologists, establishing the origin of OK became something of an obsession, equivalent to mathematicians' long quest for the proof to Fermat's last theorem.

For years Americans assumed that OK must be of American origin, if only because it was so successful. Some doubt about this claim arose in the second world war when American soldiers discovered that OK was already familiar in other countries; in Britain, of course, but in Japan and even (according to H.L. Mencken, an American writer on language) among the Bedouin in the Sahara.

Some linguists suggested that OK was of European origin. After all, the Europeans had been knocking around the world long before Americans got on to the scene. Germans said it was the initials of the fiercely-sounding rank of Oberst Kommandant. The French put in a claim for Aux Cayes, a town they had established in Haiti that produced superior rum. A British scholar said the use of OK in Britain predated any American influence and had probably come from Elizabethan English. Things were getting serious in the world of etymology. Step forward the Americans' champion, Allen Walker Read.

Racy words

As early as he could remember Mr Read was interested in the origin of words. In Minnesota, where he was born, he sought the source of local place names, and wrote a paper on the subject while studying at Iowa University. He had a spell in England as a Rhodes scholar and returned to teach English at various universities in the mid-west. He sought words that he said had “a racy, human quality”, and there were none racier than the graffiti collected by Mr Read during a trip of several months through the western United States and Canada in the summer of 1928.

He put together the results of his trip in a book entitled, “Lexical Evidence from Epigraphy in Western North America: a Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary”. Notwithstanding the academic title, the book contained material unacceptable for publication at the time in America. One of the milder entries, found by Mr Read on a monument, reads: “When you want to shit in ease/Place your elbows on your knees/Put your hands against your chin/Let a fart and then begin”. Mr Read had the book printed in Paris in 1935, perhaps encouraged that James Joyce had first published “Ulysses” there in the 1920s. Even so, only 75 copies of “Lexical Evidence” were printed and issued privately to “students of linguistics, folklore, abnormal psychology and allied branches of social sciences”. The book was published in the United States in 1977 as “Classic American Graffiti”.

Mr Read, who was professor of English at Columbia University in New York for nearly 30 years from 1945, published several other books and hundreds of papers, mainly on American English. Discovering the origin of OK was, he said, no more than an agreeable diversion from his main work. It was fun to do the research, helped by his wife Charlotte, a scholar in semantics. But for envious fellow etymologists it was the pinnacle of his career.

In his hunt for the origin of OK he was offered dozens of theories. The first to go were the European ones. They were appealing: Mr Read liked what he called “frolicsome” ideas. But they had no substance, he said. He was convinced that OK was American. He warmed to the idea that the popularity of Orrin Kendall biscuits, supplied to soldiers on the Union side in the civil war, had lived on as OK. He noted there was a telegraph term known as Open Key. But OK proved to have been used much earlier. Writing in American Speech in 1963, Mr Read said that he had come across it in the Boston Morning Post in 1839. In what was apparently a satirical article about bad spelling it stood for “Oll Korrect”. The next stage in OK's popularity was when it was adopted by followers of Martin Van Buren, who in 1836 became the eighth president of the United States, and unsuccessfully stood for re-election in 1840, by which time he was widely known as Old Kinderhook, a nickname he derived from his home town. “Vote for OK” was snappier than using his Dutch name.

Mr Read showed how, stage by stage, OK was spread throughout North America and the world to the moon, and then took on its new form AOK, first used by space people and frowned on by purists. This being an exercise in the academic world, there remain some doubters. Some believe that the Boston newspaper's reference to OK may not be the earliest. Some are attracted to the claim that it is of American-Indian origin. There is an Indian word, okeh, used as an affirmative reply to a question. Mr Read treated such doubting calmly. “Nothing is absolute,” he once wrote, “nothing is forever.”