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Old 03-27-2011, 11:21 AM   #43
Bilbo1967
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cassidym View Post
That's it. Invented by a bunch of upper middle class boys in Boston back in the early 1900's. It was popular among them to imitate the bad English used by immigrants and one of them invented OK as the misspelled abbreviation for All Correct

Learned this from Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue. Very interesting book. Incidentally, I'm about three quarters of the way through his At Home which is also fascinating.
I haven't read Mother Tongue for a while - it is an interesting book - but I thought that that was just one theory. Others included a contraction of Martin van Buren's nickname (Old Kinderhook) and a derivation from a Native American language word. I thought that there was no definitive evidence for any of them?
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