Initialisms

R U OK hun?

The word ‘OK’, or ‘okay’ which is my usual spelling, might feel fairly modern. And while it certainly isn’t as old as some, it’s no spring chicken either – it’s around 180 years old. It’s understood in most languages, and even has its own (possibly racist) hand gesture. But where did it come from?

To find out, we’re going to travel back to 1839.

Time for some LOLs

You might think that txt-spk abbreviations like YOLO and FOMO are a modern invention. But cool cats in the 19th century were all over that shizzle – with a twist. These crazy kids deliberately misspelled words before they abbreviated them. Like ‘KG’, which stood for ‘know go’, a misspelling of ‘no go’. Hilarious, right? Well, no, but they didn’t have Netflix, so let’s forgive them.

Anyhoo, on 23 March 1839, the abbreviation ‘o.k.’ appeared in an article in the American newspaper, the Boston Morning Post. It was a shortening of ‘oll korrect’ a ‘humorous’ misspelling of ‘all correct’ as part of a piss-take of another newspaper by the Post’s editor Charles Gordon Greene. OK appeared again in the Boston Post a few days later, and it wasn’t long before it began to slip into the vernacular.

But it really took off a few months later thanks to a presidential campaign.

Making America OK again

This might be a white supremacist’s hand, sorry

The then-current US president was Martin Van Buren who was running against William Henry Harrison (seems everyone had three names in 1800s Murica). Harrison had some apparently kick-ass campaign slogans, although I confess they mean nothing to me – ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too’ and ‘Log Cabin and Hard Cider’, for example (WHAT). Van Buren’s supporters decided to use ‘OK’ as theirs. This was based on the fact that Van Buren was from the upstate New York town of Kinderhook, and so was nicknamed ‘Old Kinderhook’. And thanks to that article in the Boston Post it now had the double-meaning of oll korrect too. I can imagine them all slapping themselves on the backs at the campaign headquarters after coming up with that.

Despite their cleverness, OK didn’t prove a good enough campaign slogan and Harrison’s hard cider was the winner. Sadly he didn’t have long to celebrate though. He has the dubious honour of the shortest presidency in United States history – even less than Liz Truss – at 31 days. He did die though, which is a much better excuse than Truss. The same wasn’t true of OK which refused to go away, becoming firmly ensconced in everyday speech.

I should probably say that the above is the most widely accepted theory for the origin of OK. There are several others, including that it’s:

  • a derivative of the German ‘ohne Korrektur’ (‘without correction’)

  • from the Scots ‘och aye’

  • from the Wolof (a national language of Senegal) ‘waw-kay’

  • from an army biscuit called ‘Orrin Kendall’

  • from a native American Choctaw chief called Old Keokuk.

And what about the spelling? Well, it’s really up to you. ‘OK’ in all caps with no full stops is the most common, followed by my favourite ‘okay’ which developed some time later. The all-lower-case ‘ok’ is also acceptable, although it’s not as popular as the other two. But considering the word itself comes from a misspelling, maybe it’s not worth getting too het up over.

WY(M)DKAA or, words you (maybe) didn’t know are acronyms

You probably already know that scuba’s an acronym, right? (It stands for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Well, obvs.) But there are lots of other words we use every day that you might not know are actually short for something (okay, maybe you only use them every day if you work for NASA or are an American police person, but let’s just gloss over that, m’kay?). Here are my top five.

LASER

‘Do you expect me to talk?’

‘No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!’

That’s my favourite laser-based scene from the movies. Anyway, that has nothing to do with this post. Laser’s short for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. This is bound to come up in a pub quiz at some point so I’ve tried to commit it to memory but so far I can only remember ‘light’ and ‘radation’. Half a point?

TASER

These aren’t all going to rhyme, honest. Even though it looks nothing like a gun, Taser stands for Thomas A Swift's Electric Rifle. This actually has a weirdly nice backstory (considering it’s a not-so-nice thing). Tom Swift is the lead character in a young adult novel called Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle; or, Daring Adventures in Elephant Land (awesome title – although a bit of research reveals it’s now considered horrendously racist, so maybe don’t rush down to Waterstones) which was a favourite of Taser inventor Jack Cover.

Apparently he added in the ‘A’ – Tom Swift doesn’t have a middle name in the book – which is lucky as otherwise we’d all be trying to work out how to say TSER.

GIF

Speaking of working out how to say things, why, oh why, does no one know how to pronounce GIF? I favour a hard ‘g’ myself (like ‘git’) but apparently Steve Wilhite, the creator of the GIF image format, says it’s pronounced with a soft ‘g’, because it echoes the name of an American peanut butter brand, Jif (I don’t know why). Luckily, because lots of people on the internet have too much time on their hands, someone’s put together a whole website on why it should be a hard ‘g’. And here’s someone arguing the exact opposite.

Wars have been fought over less…

Sorry, I almost forgot to say what it stands for: Graphics Interchange Format. Which is much less interesting than the whole pronunciation thing.

SMART car

It’s not because they’re smart and you can fit them in teeny-tiny spaces. It stands for Swatch Mercedes ART apparently. This is because the cars were developed by Swatch (yes, the watch people) and Daimler Benz. They started life as ‘Swatchmobiles’ but this was scrapped (pardon the pun) for a reason I can’t find.

I can’t think of anything amusing to say about this, so here’s a link to some funny pictures of smart cars instead.

BASE jumping

The BASE bit’s short for Building, Antenna, Span and Earth, which apparently is the stuff you can jump off of (although I’m not sure how you can jump off a span or the earth). If you make a jump from each of the four categories you get a BASE number. Whatever that is, I’m never going to get one.

Just in case you’re not clear on what BASE jumping is, here’s a video of some mental people jumping off what I think is an electricity pylon. Warning – contains some NSFW language (well, I’d be swearing too if I was going to jump off an electricity pylon) and dirty fingernails.

A note on acronyms v initialisms (and backronyms)

Loads of us (me included up until a few years ago) use and abuse the word ‘acronym’. An acronym only applies to an abbreviation that you pronounce as a word. So the ones on this list are all acronyms. If you pronounce the individual letters of an abbreviation (like BBC or FBI), it’s an initialism, not an acronym.

There are also things called backronyms, which are when we make words that aren’t acronyms or initialisms into, well, acronyms or initialisms (that’s a horrible sentence, sorry). It’s basically retconning a word, usually for a laugh. ‘Bing’ (the Microsoft search engine) has been backronymed (not a word) as ‘Because It’s Not Google’.

Apparently SOS is a backronym. It doesn’t stand for ‘Save our souls’ at all – the letters were just chosen because they’re easy to transmit in Morse code. WTF, right?