Kulture Korner: Origins of "OK"

 (This post is dedicated to my dad, who will insist until his deathbed that the phrase OK originated with Martin Van Buren's "Old Kinderhook" campaign)

It's not always just hydroelectric dams and missile launches on the pages of North Korea's premier monthly literary journal. They also have a long tradition of printing short "world culture" and "world literature" corners. I came across this one in the January 2000 edition of Chosŏn Munhak:

The text explains that the popular phrase "OK" first originated with a US postal worker named Obed Korey who, when charged with validating large stacks of mail, took to scribbling his initials "OK" on each piece. It was then adopted by the US telegraph bureau as a shorthand for verifying all telegrams, and the usage expanded from there.

I'm guessing on the spelling of the name, because I could find absolutely nothing online verifying this story. It could be that they just made it up, though if so I'm not sure why they would settle on this story, which does not go out of its way to bash the US or otherwise support their ideology. (Readers,  if you can find any other reference to this story, please hmu on Twitter).

Chosŏn Munhak gets a pass on this one, though, because even out here in the information-rich free world there are a bunch of nincompoops with mistaken ideas about the origins of the term.

The best rundown of all the alternate theories, along with the correct history, can be found at the Economist (alternate here). Hint: It didn't start with Martin Van Buren's campaign slogan. It's much, much stupider than that.

Why is this interesting? Well, it suggests that the phrase OK is so ubiquitous that even North Koreans were apparently well familiar with it in 2000 and at least mildly interested in its origins.

Using the magic of Quanteda, I found just ten instances of "OK" in my entire database of novels and short stories. From what I can tell, the phrase occurs exclusively in 1) speech by Americans (or slavishly pro-American South Korean characters) or 2) thoughts/descriptions associated with Americans. Below are a couple of examples:

"Road Guide" [길안내자], a short story about pro-North smugglers in southern Korea in the late 1940s, by author Pak Sŏng Jin, published in the Sept 2016 issue of Choson Munhak:

 "The villagers had heard a rumor that a US military training ground was to be built on their land, but when they asked about it they were beaten like beans on a threshing floor by the thuggish 'Northwest Youth League' gang... When [an 18-year-old local woman] went to an American officer to protest, the guy looked at her with a lustful spark in his pale eyes and said, “Okay, sweetheart!" [오케이, 색시!]

The Cuckoo Never Sleeps, a historical novel set in newly democratic South Korea in the early 1990s, by author Hyŏn Myŏng Su, published in 2016:

"Long ago, Cho Dae-pung had learned through painful experience that he needed the support of the United States to hold power in this country. Even if he lacked all political experience and had no popularity with the people, as long as he had the United States in his corner everything was okay [만사는 오케이였다]."  [context: Cho is a fictional former KCIA director turned conservative National Assembly member]