Sentinel And Advertiser

THE ORIGIN OF "O. K."
THE FAMOUS ABBREVIATION PROBABLY CAME FROM THE CHOCTAW.
Andrew Jackson the First to Use the Expression-Translation of a Choctaw Word-Extract from an Old Court Record.

[American Magazine of History.]

In the language of the Choctaw Indians, one of the most frequently recurring expressions is the emphatic oke, with which an affirmation or denial is concluded. This oka (pronounced with strong accent on the last syllable) is one of the substitutes for the copulative verb "to be" which is wanting in Choctaw. Oke. as pronounced in Choctaw. has exactly the same sound as the alphabetic pronunciation of the O. K. in English.

The meaning of the expression, as nearly as it can be conveyed in English, is: "That is true; that is all so." A few examples, out of many that might be cited, will illustrate this. "The Choctaw Indian is a good fellow" is expressed thus: Hattak api huma Chahta achukmah oke. in which hattak api huma means "Indian" (literally, man-body red), achukmah means "good," and oke is the copulative expression. "it is so." In the Rev. Cyrus Byington's Choctaw New Testament the first sentence of Matt. 5. 13: "Ye are the salt of the earth." is : gakni in hupof huchchia hoke. literally: "the earth it salt ye: that is so."

To Gen. Andrew Jackson is attributed the introduction of the Choctaw word into our Anglo-American speech. Before the war of 1812, in voyages up and down the Mississippi and in trading expeditions, overland from Nashville, Tenn., to Natchez, Miss., through the Choctaw nation, he was brought into frequent communication with the Choctaws.

Gen, Jackson. as everybody knows, was prone to the use of downright and energetic methods of assertion. Hearing this emphatic oke so frequently uttered by the Choctaw people, he learned the meaning conveyed by it to the Choctaw mind and appropriated it, out of hand. to his own purposes. From him it passed over to the multitude. This account of the origin of O. K. has been current in the south for many years. If not true, it is, to say the least, ben trovato

No one who has ever read an autograph letter of Gen. Jackson's will easily credit the story that he was in the habit. when he was president of the United States, of indorsing. in kalten blute. applications for office. with the letters O. K., under the belief that these were the proper initials for "all correct."

Jackson was no scholar, but he was not so grossly ignorant of English orthography as to fall into a blunder of that sort. He may have indorsed documents with the letters O. K, as a jocular symbol of his favorite Choctaw expression. The story that these letters were seriously intended by him as an abbreviation of "oll korrect" was probably, as Mr, George Bancroft suggests, an a posteriori invention of the enemy-to wit, the Whigs-during the hot political contests in the days of tho roaring '40's.

That the abbreviation O. K. was coined by Jackson himself and used by him long years before it passed into current slang, finds curious confirmation in an extract from the old court records of Sumner county, Tenn. quoted by Parton in his "Life of Jackson, vol. 1, page 136:

"October 6, 1790. Andrew Jackson,E sq.. proved a bill of sale from Hugh McGary to Gasper Mansker. for a negro man. which was O. K." [A common western mistake." adds Mr.Parton, "for O. R., which means Ordered Recorded. Hence, perhaps, the saying O. K."J

It is not more likely that the O. K. of this entry was suggested by Jackson himself, as a brief way of saying, after the Choctaw fashion. that the claim had been legally made out