Alphabetical (28 page)

•
RATHER WONDERFULLY
, ‘O'
starts out its life 4,000 years ago as the Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘the eye'. Ancient Semites borrowed this and called it ‘ayin', meaning ‘eye' in their language. The sound at this stage was one of the Semitic ‘guttural' sounds, the ‘ch' you make at the back of your throat. This was the true initial sound of ‘ayin', much as the Hebrew name ‘Chaim' begins that way too. The Phoenician ‘ayin' in around 1000
BCE
reduced the eye to the outline of the pupil – an ‘o' shape. It still meant ‘eye'. In around 650
BCE
, the ancient Greeks adopted this ‘o', calling it ‘mikron' (meaning a small ‘o'), and to the Greeks it was a vowel, making the short ‘o' as in our word ‘hot'. They already had the long ‘o' with their letter ‘omega' as pronounced in our word ‘owe'. The Romans created a thin-thick form of the ‘O'.

o

The early medieval scribes produced a small version of ‘O', which was adopted by the early printers as their lower case.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The Norman French seemed to have arrived in England calling this letter by its ‘long o' sound and it has survived intact in both French and English.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

On its own in words ‘o' can give us the ‘short o' in ‘pot', and the ‘long o' in ‘no'. It can give us the ‘oo' of ‘do' and the ‘short u' sound in ‘son' and ‘some'.

With other vowels, the letters ‘r', ‘y', ‘w' and the ‘e'
following a consonant, it can give us: ‘boat', ‘toe', ‘neon', ‘neo-gothic', ‘quoit', ‘riot', ‘youth' and ‘snout'. We use it to write ‘Mao' and ‘miaow' and it works in names like Chloe and Noel (with or without a dieresis on the ‘e'). It can do service in ‘lord', ‘boy', ‘low' and ‘cow', and as the suffix ‘-or' as in ‘actor' and the US version of the ‘-our' ending: ‘color' and ‘favorite'. When we double ‘o' it can be shorter as in ‘foot' or longer as in ‘coot'.

‘O' is an abbreviation in ‘three o'clock' (‘of the clock') where it's pronounced more as an ‘a'. It lives on in thousands of Irish names like ‘O'Connor' and ‘O'Driscoll' where it means ‘descendant of Driscoll'.

‘O' entirely on its own is of course the exclamation of surprise or delight with or without the ‘h' of ‘oh'. Poets and playwrights were very fond of ‘O' and ‘Oh' right up until the 1960s, when it was quietly dropped on the grounds of being naff. It survives where it always thrived, in songs where it merges with ‘uh' and ‘ah'.

It's also the only letter which is exactly the same symbol as a number, enabling car registration-plate enthusiasts to work wonders with the numbers if they are lucky enough to have an ‘o' in their name.

With ‘this wooden O', Shakespeare was almost certainly referring to the Globe Theatre (of which he was a part-shareholder) in the prologue of
Henry V
, and the ‘O' of
The Story of O
can be taken to mean a metaphor for anything from zero to sex and back.

‘Ooooo' can mean very different things depending on the notes you hit. It can indicate ‘you're looking good', ‘you're acting a bit above yourself', ‘this is exciting' and so on.

In combination with consonants, you can say you've hurt yourself: ‘ouch' and ‘ow'.

O
IS FOR OK

. . . BUT IS IT
OK to write OK, Ok, Okay and ok? And should people who say, ‘Okily-dokily' be given a custodial sentence?

When zoologists looked at the duck-billed platypus, they had problems. They had their way of classifying animals but this beast didn't fit. What's more, it looked like a hoax. The duck-billed platypus was fine – it's still fine; it just goes on being a duck-billed platypus. It doesn't wonder what kind of animal it is.

OK is a duck-billed platypus.

We have no fixed way of writing ‘OK' because we don't know whether it is two initials or a transcription of a non-English word. Either way, it sounds like two letters. It may well have started out in life as an ‘interjection' – like ‘uh-huh' – but it has now risen to the status of a word. Look at it: one moment, it's being adjectival and the next, adverbial:

‘You're an OK sort of a guy.' (adjective)

‘If you can run OK, you'll be picked for the team.' (adverb)

‘I've given him the OK to run.' (noun)

‘I've okayed him for the race.' (verb)

Unlike the platypus, OK lives everywhere. There are few places left in the world where an ‘OK!' accompanied by a smile and a nod would be misunderstood. And unlike the platypus, it can acquire appendages: A-OK, okey-dokey, hokie-dokie and the aforesaid okily-dokily.

It is clearly a popular, useful and powerful word. It works. It even has its own hand-sign: tip of the first finger on to the tip of the thumb to make an o-shape, the other four fingers raised, though that seems to be an OK-plus, a better-than-just-OK kind of OK. You might have thought, with all that going for it, that we would be proud that humanity had invented a noise that could do so much for so many. Not so. In many circles, it is a despised little expression, seen as lazy, imprecise, slangy and – in some countries – an unwelcome Americanism. It's a low-status word even when used by high-status people. If a prime minister or president wants to sound informal, he or she will use ‘OK'. In a formal setting, as in a news broadcast, it won't make the grade. You'll be told to not use it in a job application or in an essay on the causes of the First World War.

There isn't a clear answer why ‘OK' hasn't been allowed into the academy that is formal prose writing. I suspect it's a cluster of connotations to do with its origins and its sound. I'll get on to the theories of its precise origins in a moment, but whatever these are, ‘OK' took up a regular posting in the informal speech of non-posh Americans just as ‘gee!' and ‘wow!' have. Once a word is situated in a place like that, it's hard for it to fight its way into formal writing. Whatever its virtues, standard English is also a code which signals that the writer has had a particular kind of education. A rule like ‘Don't use “OK” in your essays' does this job.

I think something else is involved: the sound. Though using initials for organizations, posts, qualifications and awards can
be formal (CNN, MP, BA), initializing of expressions is often more colloquial or euphemistic (KBU: ‘keen but useless', ‘sweet FA'). Perhaps we see some initialled expressions as not being the full or real thing – OK for note-taking and chat but not for proper writing. No matter what its true origins are, we hear ‘OK' as two letters and that's part of how we think of it. The irony here would be that ‘OK' may be a ‘loan word', ‘borrowed' from another language and kept, and fully entitled to keep its place alongside ‘robots', ‘verandahs' and ‘culottes'.

My first go at the etymology of ‘OK' was when I was about six. I knew then that the word ‘OK' came from sauce bottles. By the time I was putting it on my chips, it had been around for over thirty years and, along with Christmas pudding, is the distant descendant of Middle Eastern foods brought to Europe by returning Crusaders. Reading ‘OK' on OK Sauce bottles was part of how I learned to read. At the time, did I but know, the sauce was being made in the kind of factory that was being hailed as the utopian future of British industry: clean, chimneyless, tiled works placed by the side of a bypass or ‘arterial road'. Fans of art deco, brown sauce or the word ‘OK' can support their interest by taking a trip to number 265 Merton Road, Southfields, London, where a plaque marks the building's history.

However much I would like my bottle of OK Sauce to be the explanation of the word's origins, wishing it won't make it so. There is a whole bunch of contenders for the real origin: from a Greek expression, ‘ola kala' (meaning ‘it's good'); as a loan word from the American Choctaw nation, ‘oke' or ‘okeh' (meaning ‘it's so'); a French dockers' expression, ‘au quai' (meaning ‘it's all right to send to the quay'); another French dockers' expression, ‘aux Cayes' (meaning ‘to or at Cayes', a place renowned for good rum); the initials of a railroad freight agent, Obadiah Kelly, who put his initials on documents he had
approved; an expression meaning ‘all right' circulating in the languages of West African peoples; an anglicization of the Scots expression ‘och aye'; and finally – the one I was told when I wondered about brown sauce labelling – that it was a mock initializing of the misspelled ‘orl korrekt' or ‘oll korrect', something that young swells from Boston liked to do in the 1830s.

Its first written, testified use is by the Democrats during the presidential election of 1840. Their candidate, Martin Van Buren, had the nickname of ‘Old Kinderhook' (after his birthplace in New York State), and his supporters called themselves the ‘OK Club'. This may have helped the spread of the expression but it didn't help Martin Van Buren. He lost the election.

I have another suggestion: it comes from all these sources. The theory I'm working to here is that some expressions and words don't come from one source alone. As one example amongst thousands, the expression ‘the full monty' can claim several origins. Perhaps what happens is that a word or expression starting out in one place chimes with the same or a similar one in another, and together they snowball into widespread usage. One of the main causes of language change is that people hear something that sounds like something that they already say and they add that to their vocabulary or ‘linguistic repertoire'. Colloquial words often catch on when you think that saying a given word will make you sound good to others when you say it.

In the case of ‘OK', the main cause of its spreading has been ‘mateyness'. If I say it I will sound more matey, more affable, more ‘with you' than indifferent or hostile to you. One of the key times and places to indicate mateyness is when peoples who perceive each other as different meet up and wish to be friendly. A shorthand way of saying ‘things are fine' is very useful. Saying ‘good' in someone else's language is an excellent way of showing
friendliness. My first visits to France as a teenager were constantly sprinkled with me saying ‘bon'. In the list of possible contenders for ‘OK's origin, there seem to be thousands, if not millions, of small encounters in which saying ‘OK' would have done that job very well. If I'm right, ‘OK' would be a symbol of ‘interculturalism', the way peoples of different origins share culture.

Even so, let's hear it for the Boston wags. According to Allen Walker Read, there was a fad in the 1830s for abbreviations of expressions said in local accents and dialects: ‘KY' for ‘know yuse', ‘NS' for ‘nuff said', ‘OW' for ‘oll wright', and even initials for misspellings: ‘KG', for ‘know go' and ‘NC' for ‘nuff ced'. It sounded funny and cool to say ‘OK' for ‘orl korrekt'. As it happens, it seems as if plenty of peoples were saying something like ‘OK' well before that but it would be the encounters between these peoples, along with the snappy sign ‘OK', which made it stick.

THE STORY OF

• A DOUBLE-LINED
V-shape appears in early Semitic from 3,800 years ago. It's thought that this was ‘pe' meaning ‘mouth'. By 1000
BCE
, the Phoenicians were writing it as a diagonal hook shape, and also calling it ‘pe' meaning ‘mouth'. It took the sound of ‘p' as the initial letter. The early ancient Greeks adopted it and called it ‘pi', with the hook on the left in their right-to-left inscriptions. Early Roman inscriptions kept the upright stroke and started to curl the hook over but by around 200
BCE
the curl had closed up, the letter reversed for left-to-right writing and the ‘P' was fully formed. The inscriptions of Imperial Rome added the serifs and the thin-thick lines.

p

A smaller ‘p' appears in the early medieval manuscripts and this leads to the shape taken up by the later standardizers of the letters; and, following their design, there is the lower-case type of the early printers, bringing the small ‘p' below the line.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The ancient Greeks pronounced this letter as ‘pee', though Phoenicians and Romans probably pronounced it ‘pay'. That's how it came into England with the Normans and then, following the Great Vowel Shift, this turned into ‘pee'.