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Comment by CTDOCodebases | Hacker News Reader

I always find it odd when people track down the invention of something to one source when multiple people were using the same phrase around the same time.

Sure it's popularisation may have been fueled by a particular person or group but did they really invent it? Or did they refit an existing abbreviation to fit their purpose? Or was it just invented in parallel?

One explanation I have heard about "OK" is that it was an abbreviation invented by Greek migrant dock workers in the USA. Apparently they used to write the abbreviation "OK" on boxes that contained what they were supposed to contain. "ola kala" is a Greek phrase that basically means "everything good".

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Slang words tend to produce loads of folk etymologies that have little basis in reality. Partially, this is because slang words tend to be less visible in records that survive to the modern time. And also partially, etymology tends to be a field where people feel inclined to make stuff up that sounds right and these stories get passed along because feeling right is valued more highly than actually being right.

The proposed etymologies of OK fall into three main buckets:

* OK is an initialism for a misspelled variant of 'all correct'

* OK is a phonetic rendition of some phrase in $LANGUAGE (there are a few different such languages proposed)

* OK is an initialism for some phrase in $LANGUAGE (again, different phrases in different languages have been proposed)

Of these etymologies, the second bucket can be pretty thoroughly ruled out immediately: OK shows up in our sources first as an initialism, not 'okay', so it's not likely to be anything other than an initialism. As for deciding what it's an initialism of... well, "all correct" is actually the most reasonable on first guess because someone who is going to come up with a "just-so" story for a folk-etymology is likely to go for a phrase which actually initializes to OK rather than one which conspicuously doesn't, and thus someone advancing an "all correct" theory is likely to be able to point to evidence of its truth. Which we have.

I understand evidence is important.

I guess the issue I have is how much certainty do we assign to whatever origin we attribute.

I guess we can say that the explanation in the article is the best guess with the available evidence but what do we do if the evidence is limited?

Take the example I gave. How many cardboard boxes were around when people decided to start hunting down the first instance of “OK”? What is the likely hood of someone photographing one of those boxes given the prevalence of photography at the time and the importance of a cardboard box?

But do stories like the origin being "ola kala" have any actual primary-source evidence? If not, they're just old wives' tales.

This version has actual evidence. It has the first recorded use. It situates it in the context of the fad at the time. It shows that in the first usage the author included the expanded version because other people wouldn't know it. It shows how it was replied to be someone who had read the article.

I find it odd when someone replies to a piece of research with their own story that they believe simply because they heard it first.

That's a story with no evidence, though. The written records simply cannot support it. All we have is supposition or people quoting it to each other saying it was Greek whoevers but no unselfconscious uses of it in that context.

In this instance, this is such an elegant, concise and multilayered response.

Simultaneously:

- "Let's be done with this statement."

- "What's the interesting point here?"

- "We chose a civil approach here, going with indifference to these string of words"

- "Look how great the word 'OK' is. Two letters to express all this."

Did you know people had achieved manpowered flight before the Wright brothers? Can you name any of them? If you aren’t the wellspring of popularity then nobody cares.

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