O.K.

 

O.K.

O.K. sauce, 1913

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

O.K. sauce was one of several vinegar-based brown sauces available for slathering over food like chips, bacon, sausages or cheese in the UK. It isn’t the oldest – that honour belongs to HP sauce, which is also the most popular, accounting for three quarters of all sales. It is not now available in UK but is still produced by Colmans for the Asian market.

I may be mistaken - it happens frequently – but I recall reading the label on the back of a bottle of O.K. sauce when I was young. I’m sure it described the derivation of O.K. as the abbreviation of an incorrect spelling by a young army officer of ‘All correct’ as ‘Orl Korrect’.

Seeking corroboration, I find no record of this. In fact, there are many conflicting stories of how O.K. originated, and very interesting they are. One says that derives from the Scottish ‘och aye’, meaning ‘oh yes.’ Others suggested that O.K. were the initials variously of a Swedish worker, Olaf Knutsen, or an American quality controller for General Motors, called Oscar Kirby, each of whom would stamp their initials on components that had reached the quality requirements.  Yet another suggests a connection with the Established Church of Scotland. Communion tokens were distributed four times a year to parishioners examined and found worthy to take communion.

See the following, from Karl Felsen of New York:

‘The "K" stands for Kirk, and the "O" stands for a particular parish in Scotland (Ochiltree-1762, Oldhamstocks, Ormiston-1733). There were also several tokens with a stand alone "K" on a circular token (These stand for Kilmorack, Kilmuir, Kingussie, Kintail, and Knockbain.)This all comes from "Communion Tokens of the Established Church of Scotland, Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries" by Alexander J.S. Frook, FSA, in the "Proceedings of the Established Church of Scotland, May 13, 1907. The Charlton Standard Catalogue of Canadian Tokens shows an "OK" token for Ormstown but says the "OK" stands in this later 1841 token for "O(ld) K(irk). . . . . . . . . . . Now the vast, vast majority of communion tokens do not have "OK" on them or a "K" on a circular token, but if "OK" did come to mean "Old Kirk" as the Charlton Catalogue claims, I could see how it could enter the Scottish settler's vocabulary as just what it came to mean. I have absolutely no evidence of OK either in speech or writing in this sense, but there is no doubt that there were chunks of metal (round and square) with "OK" stamped on them floating around in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that these chunks of metal literally meant that the possessor had been found OK in our understanding of the term and should be accepted for communion in any kirk he or she enters.’

However, Wictionary says it is

‘A deliberate, humorous corruption of all correct, dating from the 1830s, recognized as one of several possible origins for the term OK.’

O.K. became popular in the USA in the 1830s. It was used in the 1840 American Presidential Election. The Democratic candidate seeking re-election as President was  Martin van Buren, nicknamed Old Kinderhook after his birthplace. His supporters formed O.K. clubs around the country and O.K. had a double meaning – it was all right or acceptable – O.K. - to vote for Old Kinderhook – O.K.   Van Buren was defeated, which was not O.K. for the Democrats.

The expression was cloaked in mystery until a Columbia University professor of English, Allen Walker Read, discovered its true origins in the 1960s. O.K. first emerged in the Boston Morning Post, courtesy of its editor, Charles Gordon Greene, as he took literary pot shots at a Providence newspaper in 1839.