The OLD Philosopher – John M. Mille
Martin Van Buren was a one-term president who followed Andrew Jackson in the White House. He served from 1836 to 1840, but his political influence lasted up to the Civil War, during which he died in 1862. However, his greatest legacy occurred through a two-letter expression which he used and was used about him by a newspaper editor.
Van Buren came from a small Dutch town on the Hudson River called Kinderhook. He was a member of a club of the leading citizens of Kinderhook who called themselves Old Kinderhook. After he became president, he started using the term OK (sometimes spelled “okay”) to suggest that anything that was politically, socially, or culturally highly acceptable, or even preferable, it was therefore “OK.” That’s the way Van Buren saw it, and that’s the way the editor saw Van Buren.
Eventually OK could also mean moderately or barely acceptable, as in “Pickled pigs’ feet sprouts are OK.” It could also be used to try to end a heated argument about something, as in “Enough, already! OK!” (or “OK?”) Its usage is flexible for making comments about almost anything.
Whole articles and books have been written about “OK” by linguists and philologists (literally, “lovers of words”). The trouble is that not many people read such academic treatises, and thus are unaware of word origins. Nonetheless, by now, a century and a half after Martin Van Buren shuffled off this mortal coil (Google it), billions of people around the world, using hundreds of languages, know what OK means, even if they have no idea of where it came from.
As time goes on, every language expands by acquiring and absorbing words from other languages and cultures in the global village. We all have a basic understanding of such words as Valhalla, nirvana, jihad, typhoon, harakiri (harrycarry in English), apartheid, pandemonium, c’est la vie (say-la-vee in English), maelstrom, kaffeeklatsch, boomerang (with its two primary meanings), Gestapo, wildebeest, kumbayah, and so on.
Technology has added scores of words or acronyms with scores of new meanings to all contemporary modern languages: mouse, click, scroll, delete, insert, backspace, home, format, DNA, CTscan, PETscan, ultrasound, etc., etc, etc.
Every language on earth, except those belonging to isolated tribes in the Upper Amazon or on small oceanic islands, has acquired thousands of new words in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But no language is as acquisitive as English. In its four hundred years of existence, the British Empire extended the English language to many dozens of what eventually became nation-states. All of those places added new words to English. English is the world’s most-widely spoken first- or second-language. It also has the most words of any language.
I don’t know if the Merriam Corporation still exists, or if it does, whether it is still publishing Webster’s Unabridged Dictionaries. It is only libraries and academic institutions which can afford to purchase one of those --- in every sense of the word --- heavy tomes. If they do, they are a lot heavier now than they were fifty or a hundred years ago. In 2021 they must be heavy enough to serve as doorstop sufficient for deterring a charging rhinoceros. Perhaps computers have obviated the need for such dictionaries, but I doubt it.
As an uncertified philologist, the amazing versatility of language will always be AOK with me. It makes life ever so much more fascinating. – December 3, 2021
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at wwwchapelwithoutwalls.org.