OK began as a bad joke
Cuts · English · @cuts_en ·
The most successful typo in English. AI-voiced.
Transcript
0:00 The most widely understood word on Earth
0:02 started as a newspaper gag.
0:04 In eighteen thirty-nine,
0:06 Boston editors were running a fad for comic
0:09 misspelled abbreviations,
0:11 and OK stood for oll korrect,
0:13 a deliberately wrong spelling of all correct.
0:17 It should have died with the fad.
0:19 What saved it was an election:
0:21 supporters of Martin Van Buren,
0:23 who was from Kinderhook, formed the OK Club,
0:26 and the two meanings fused into something
0:29 people repeated without thinking.
0:31 Telegraph operators then adopted it because
0:34 it was short and unmistakable in Morse.
0:36 A joke about bad spelling became the default
0:39 way half the planet says yes.