AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this
week on Wordmaster -- a tribute to Allen Walker Read, who died this
month at the age of 96. Mr. Read devoted his life to a kind of
linguistic detective work on the origins of American speech.
RS: As an English professor at Columbia
University in New York, Allen Read became most widely known for tracing
the term "O.K." all the way back to the 1830s.
AA: As his
friend Richard Bailey at the University of Michigan tells the story,
jokes with language were popular at the time, including those that used
ridiculous abbreviations.
BAILEY: "And in the course of
this humorous exchange appeared in 1938 in Boston the expression 'O.K.,'
standing for 'all correct' -- O-L-L K-O-R-R-E-C-T.'"
RS: "Now that's misspelled."
BAILEY: "Well, that was the joke, and the real point here is that
these young men who made up all these expressions turned out dozens of
them, and they all fell dead instantly except this one, and it was
picked up just very soon after that by the campaign for the president of
the United States, Martin Van Buren. Now, Van Buren lived in
Kinderhook, New York. So they called him 'Old Kinderhook.' Now the
reason that they could do this is that O.K. was still around and had a
kind of slangy, fresh, exciting quality to it, so these political
advisers seized on the O.K. and made use of it. And that's what people
have done every since.
RS: "But why did it have such staying powers?"
BAILEY: "Well, there actually isn't an answer to that. Of course,
it's short and easy to remember, but that would describe many creations.
This is the one that succeeded. And one of Allen Walker Read's
wonderful essays is about the folklore of O.K. and the fanciful tales
that people have thought up to explain it."
RS: "But he actually was the one to go back and take a look and pin it down and actually put a date on it."
BAILEY: "That's right, and of course the contest is still open to all
comers. Anybody who wants to go and find an example of O.K. before
March 23, 1839, will win the prize."
AA: "Which is?"
BAILEY: "Well, being the O.K. expert. (laughter)"
AA: "Now, O.K. has made its way around the world. I've heard it
described as the first truly global term or word or whatever you want to
call it."
BAILEY: "That's exactly right. It's everywhere
in the English speaking world and in almost all languages of the world.
When you see in Asia garments with O.K. printed on them, it's because
it somehow expresses this American freshness and flavor. What Allen
Read wanted to do was to say this is so typically American."
RS: "What do you think the contribution here is. What do you hope the people who read this work will come away with?"
BAILEY: "Allen loved to talk about what he called the play spirit in
language and the way people express joy through fooling with words. So
Allen Walker Read was a wonderful man for identifying and bringing to
our attention the playful in language."
AA: "Now do you
think if he were still around, he would be chronicling, let's say, the
Internet speech where you've got spelling forever with the number 4
e-v-er and 'laughing out loud' as 'lol.'
BAILEY: "Sure he
would. Oh, absolutely. I mean, his apartment in New York was filled
with papers, because he would read newspapers and write down things he
saw on subway walls. And he made this huge data file, so having the
Internet would be wonderful for him. His first book was sayings that he
found written on outhouse walls on his travels around western America,
and nobody had ever studied these, but he saw them as expressions of
ordinary people often being playful with language."
RS: "And expressions of who we are as Americans."
BAILEY: "Yes, exactly."
AA: Richard Bailey is the editor of a collection of Allen Read's
essays called "Milestones in the History of English in America,"
published this year by Duke University Press.
RS: And
that's Wordmaster for this week. We're on the Internet at
voanews.com/wordmaster. And our e-mail address is word@voanews.com.
With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.
(Source: VOA/WORMASTER & EJ-CAFE.COM)
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