{"id":7762,"date":"2012-02-28T21:29:49","date_gmt":"2012-02-28T20:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=7762"},"modified":"2012-03-02T18:31:52","modified_gmt":"2012-03-02T17:31:52","slug":"word-of-the-day-ok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=7762","title":{"rendered":"Word of the day: OK"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s one of there most commonly-used words in the English language &#8211; but what is the origin of OK? There are lots of incorrect explanations, but one can find the true history in the book &#8220;The Story Of English In 100 Words&#8221; [my review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nfbooks.html#Words\">here<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>The term first appeared in 1839 in a Boston newspaper. There was a vogue for inventing humorous abbreviations using initial letters. One of these was <em>oll korrect<\/em>. a comedic adaptation of the words <em>all correct<\/em>. All the other abbreviations used in the newspaper disappeared. Why not this one?<\/p>\n<p>Well, in the following year 1840, it came to be associated with with a totally different use &#8211; as a slogan during the US presidential election of that year. It was the shortened form of <em>Old Kinderhook<\/em>, the nickname of President <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Martin_Van_Buren\">Martin van Buren<\/a> &#8211; Kinderhook being the name of his hometown in New York State. He lost the election.<\/p>\n<p>So now you know &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s one of there most commonly-used words in the English language &#8211; but what is the origin of OK? There are lots of incorrect explanations, but one can find the true history in the book &#8220;The Story Of English In 100 Words&#8221; [my review here]. The term first appeared in 1839 in a Boston newspaper. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7762"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8056,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7762\/revisions\/8056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}