46. OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD(part -2)

The pattern was to take two already existing English words and combine them in

new ways: bullfrog, eggplant, grasshopper, rattlesnake, mockingbird, catfish.

Sometimes, however, words from the Old World were employed to describe

different but similar articles in the New. So beech, walnut, laurel, partridge,

robin, oriole, hemlock, and even pond (which in England is an artificial lake) all

describe different things in the two continents.

Settlers moving west not only had to find new expressions to describe features of

their new outsized continent—mesa, butte, bluff, and so on—but also out sized words that reflected their zestful, virile, wild cat-wrassling, hell-for-leather

approach to life.

These expressions were, to put it mildly, often colorful, and a surprising number

of them have survived: hornswoggle, cattywampus, rambunctious, absquatulate,

to move like greased lightning, to kick the bucket, to be in cahoots with, to root

hog or die. Others have faded away: monstracious, teetotaciously, helliferocious,

conbobberation, obflisticate, and many others of equal exuberance.

Of all the new words to issue from the New World, the quintessential

Americanism without any doubt was O.K. Arguably America's single greatest

gift to international discourse, O.K. is the most grammatically versatile of words,

able to serve as an adjective ("Lunch was O.K."), verb ("Can you O.K. this for

me?"), noun ("I need your O.K. on this"), interjection ("O.K., I hear you"), and

adverb ( 'We did O.K."). It can carry shades of meaning that range from casual

assent ("Shall we go?" "O.K."), to great enthusiasm ("O. K.!"), to lukewarm

endorsement ("The party was O.K."), to a more or less meaningless filler of

space ("O.K., can I have your attention please?").

It is a curious fact that the most successful and widespread of all English words,

naturalized as an affirmation into almost every language in the world, from

Serbo-Croatian to Tagalog, is one that has no correct agreed spelling (it can be

O.K., OK, or okay) and one whose origins are so obscure that it has been a

matter of heated dispute almost since it first appeared. The many theories break

down into three main camps:

1. It comes from someone's or something's initials—a Sac Indian chief called

Old Keokuk, or a shipping agent named Obadiah Kelly, or from President Martin

Van Buren's nickname, Old Kinderhook, or from Orrins-Kendall crackers, which

were popular in the nineteenth century. In each of these theories the initials were

stamped or scribbled on documents or crates and gradually came to be

synonymous with quality or reliability.

2. It is adapted from some foreign or English dialect word or place name, such as

the Finnish oikea, the Haitain Aux Cayes (the source of a particularly prized

brand of rum), or the Choctaw okeh. President Woodrow Wilson apparently so

liked the Choctaw theory that he insisted on spelling the word okeh.3. It is a contraction of the expression "oll korrect," often said to be the spelling

used by the semiliterate seventh President, Andrew Jackson.

This third theory, seemingly the most implausible, is in fact very possibly the

correct one—though without involving Andrew Jackson and with a bit of theory

one thrown in for good measure.

According to Allen Walker Read of Columbia University, who spent years

tracking down the derivation of O.K., a fashion developed among young wits of

Boston and New York in 1838 of writing abbreviations based on intentional

illiteracies. They thought it highly comical to write O.W. for "oll wright," O.K.

for "oll korrect," K.Y. for "know yuse," and so on. O.K. first appeared in print

on March 23, 1839, in the Boston Morning Post. Had that been it, the expression

would no doubt have died an early death, but coincidentally in 1840 Martin Van

Buren, known as Old Kinderhook from his hometown in upstate New York, was

running for reelection as president, and an organization founded to help his

campaign was given the name the Democratic O.K. Club. O.K. became a

rallying cry throughout the campaign and with great haste established itself as a

word throughout the country. This may have been small comfort to Van Buren,

who lost the election to William Henry Harrison, who had the no-less-snappy

slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too."

Although the residents of the New World began perforce to use new words

almost from the first day they stepped ashore, it isn't at all clear when they

began pronouncing them in a distinctively American way. No one can say when

the American accent first arose—or why it evolved quite as it did. As early as 1

79 1, Dr.

David Ramsay, one of the first American historians, noted in his History of the

American Revolution that Americans had a particular purity of speech, which he

attributed to the fact that people from all over Britain were thrown together in

America where they "dropped the peculiarities of their several provincial idioms,

retaining only what was fundamental and common to them all."

But that is not to suggest that they sounded very much like Americans of today.

According to Robert Burchfield, George Washington probably sounded as

British as Lord North. On the other hand, Lord North probably sounded more

American than would any British minister today. North would, for instance, have given necessary its full value. He would have pronounced path and bath in the

American way. He would have given r's their full value in words like cart and

horse. And he would have used many words that later fell out of use in England

but were preserved in the New World.

The same would be true of the soldiers on the battlefield, who would, according

to Burchfield, have spoken identically "except in minor particularities." [The

English Language, page 36] Soldiers from both sides would have tended not to

say join and poison as we do today, but something closer to "jine" and "pison."

Speak and tea would have sounded to modern ears more like "spake" and "tay,"

certain and merchant more like "sartin" and "marchant."

It has been said many times that hostility towards Britain at the end of the

Revolutionary War was such that America seriously considered adopting another

language. The story has been repeated many times, even by as eminent an

authority as Professor Randolph Quirk of Oxford, but it appears to be without

foundation. Someone may have made such a proposal. At this remove we cannot

be certain. But what we can say with confidence is that if such a proposal was

made it appears not to have stimulated any widespread public debate, which

would seem distinctly odd in a matter of such moment. We also know that the

Founding Fathers were so little exercised by the question of an official language

for the United States that they made not one mention of it in the Constitution. So

it seems evident that such a proposal was not treated seriously, if indeed it ever

existed.