With a tip of the hat to My Chemical Romance I'm not OK with okay, I promise

Let me tell you something that I think isn’t OK. I will start with the assertion that, though we use familiar words or phrases we rarely stop to think what they actually mean or where they came from.

Honeymoon, for instance. It’s a lovely word, conjuring images of happy, enjoyable, and perhaps energetic times. But it is a pessimistic word. The original meaning was that the sweetness won’t last, waning quickly like the moon from its full state to a shadow of its former self.

The origin of “trivial” is, I think, also interesting. The medieval education system was divided into seven liberal arts. They were the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. And the trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric.

The trivium was held to be easier to learn, of little value, and less import. So we get the modern word’s meaning. Hah, show me a mathematician who has anything better than trivial grammar skills!

Then there is the idiom: “don’t try to teach your granny to suck eggs”. It refers to a person giving advice to another who is already familiar with the task, and probably knows better than the advice-giver.

Before modern dentistry many elderly people had very bad teeth, or no teeth. The way to ingest protein was to poke a hole in each end of the shell of a raw egg and suck out the contents. Therefore, a granny was usually already an expert on sucking eggs.

I’m not sure why the granny couldn’t crack the egg into a cup.

Anyway, there is often debate over the derivation and spelling of what is the most commonly-used word in the world across all languages. That word is “OK”. Or to some, “okay”.

In Boston, in the late 1830s, there was a fashion for acronyms, much like the modern habits of text-speak which uses such tomfoolery as LOL, BRB and OMG. There was, at the same time, another “craze” for spelling simple words incorrectly. We also have this today, we call it “all public comment online”.

So “oll korrect” a humorous misspelling, became “OK”, a fashionable acronym. It stuck long after the witty wordplay of brazen Bostonians was forgotten.

This is an example of what often happens in English. A word enters the language: umbrella (from Italian); smuggle (Dutch); poodle (German); pyjamas (Hindi); tea (Chinese); or pet (Gaelic). But the origin, and any exoticism the word may have had, is soon forgotten.

All this allows me to say that, staying true to the origin, writing “okay” is never OK.