OK. Is It African?

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XCEPT FOR A PAIR of short notes in American Speech (Degges 1975, Greco 1975),'1 I have seen nothing very recent in the great OK guessing game. Mencken (1936, pp. 206-7; 1945, pp. 275-79; 1963, pp. 173-74) listed a great number of proposed etymologies from many languages, among them French aux quais, Finnish oikea, Norwegian and Danish hah gay, Scots och aye, English dialectal hoacky, Choctaw okeh, Liberian (Djabo dialect) o-ke, Burmese hoak-keh, as well as several that take it to be an acronym: Latin omnis korrecta, Greek ola kala, German Oberst Kommandant, and the Cockney orl korrec. The majority of these are obviously preposterous, offered to the newspapers by members of the public who apparently have not the faintest notion of how an etymology is established or of what makes a proposal deserve serious consideration. Etymology is especially difficult with short words because the chances of coincidence are greatly increased. Almost any language has examples that might coincide with such English monosyllables as bat, pod, or ken, whose sounds and sound-groups are found all over the world. When not only the forms of words but their meanings coincide in two or more languages in contact, it may be not only impossible but false to attribute a priority or a direction of influence (Cassidy 1966). With OK there has very likely been coincidence of this kind, since, as the most successful Americanism, it has gone around the world. Its wide adoption, indeed, may in some cases have been facilitated by the very fact that it more or less coincided with a word already existing locally. In the case of the Burmese expression, for example, which means 'is so' (Mencken 1963, p. 175), when either word is said, a Burmese-speaker hears hoak-keh, and an English-speaker hears OK, in very much the same meaning. But this coincidence proves nothing about the origin of either word. To make a plausible case for a foreign language source of OK, one would have to show that the foreign word came or at least could have come into American use and have been adopted in speech before or at least by the time of the earliest written records of OK, and in,a meaning exactly the same as or closely similar to the meaning OK had when first recorded. With words that suddenly come into vogue and spread rapidly, there are two dangers for the etymologist: early users may be themselves imprecise in using the word, and new shades of meaning may develop very rapidly. Without documentation one is in the foggy world of possibility. Here the writer with a preconceived idea, an ax to grind,