A little something captured from the NYT this morning:
| Back Story |
| It’s a shortcut used the world over — and even beyond, having been uttered at least once during a space mission. |
| On this day in 1839, The Boston Morning Post published “O.K.” for the first known time, using the abbreviation next to the words “all correct.” (It’s not written “okay,” The Times stylebook says.) |
 It’s all correct. Frank Duenzl/Picture-Alliance, via Associated Press |
| There have been many theories about its origin, but the most likely is that O.K. was an abbreviation for the deliberately misspelled “orl korrect” (all correct), and the expression gained prominence in the mid-19th century. |
| Allen Walker Read, a longtime English professor at Columbia University, debunked some theories in the 1960s, including that the term had come from Andrew Jackson’s poor spelling, from a Native American word or from an Army biscuit. |
| Today, O.K. is “an Americanism adopted by virtually every language, and one of the first words spoken on the moon,” the Times obituary of Mr. Read noted in 2002. |
| The professor didn’t “appreciate having ‘O.K.’ overshadow the hundreds of other etymologies he divined,” it continued. He also tracked early uses of Dixie, Podunk and the “almighty dollar.” |
| In the 1920s, Mr. Read hitchhiked through western Iowa hunting down the word “blizzard.” |
| “A man called Lightnin’ Ellis had first used the word for a snowstorm in 1870,” he learned. “Within 10 years, it had spread throughout the Midwest.” |
| Charles McDermid contributed reporting. |