delight
A newspaper joke in 1839 became the world's favorite word
One editor thought it was funny. The joke outlived the language it mocked.
The most widely used expression in the English language started as a joke in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839. Editor Charles Gordon Greene was writing a satirical piece about the Providence Journal when he tossed in an abbreviation at the end of a throwaway paragraph. It was "o.k.," short for "oll korrect," a deliberate misspelling of "all correct." Educated young men in Boston were deep in an abbreviation craze at the time, and they thought this was hilarious. Their other efforts, like "KY" for "know yuse," died almost immediately. OK should have too. Then Martin Van Buren's supporters formed the "O.K. Club" in 1840, playing off his nickname Old Kinderhook. Van Buren lost the election. OK won everything else. Nobody knew where it came from until the 1960s, when Columbia University linguist Allen Walker Read spent years tracing it back to Greene's joke. He was correct.