'Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story' (Part 1)

a book by Michael Rosen 

[A little over two weeks ago, I posted an article on this blog about Pearl Tytell (17 October), who appeared in many trials and hearings as an expert witness in the authentication of documents.  Tytell was especially expert in analyzing handwriting, and in one case, she had to differentiate between samples of writing to determine if they were the work of the same woman or two different women.

[The task was all the more difficult because the writing was Russian—and not just Russian, but an old alphabet that ceased to be used after 1918.  When I wrote about that case, I decided to transcribe the Russian words Tytell examined and I found that the Old Russian handwriting was difficult to decipher in the reproduction with which I had to work.

[Now, I studied Russian and can read and write it fairly well—but I only know the modern Russian Cyrillic letters.  I had to research the old alphabet to find one letter—the one in question in the investigation because in one sample it had been written incorrectly (helping Tytell prove that the words were written by two different hands, and therefore one of the women was an imposter).

[The point is that alphabets change and evolve over time—sometimes in just decades like the Russian letters which changed almost overnight by decree and the German shift from Fraktur to a modern writing system in 1941, sometimes over centuries, like the development of the modern Latin alphabet, the one in which we write English.

[In his book Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story (Counterpoint, 2015), Michael Rosen (b. 1946), examines the development of our familiar alphabet, letter by letter. He even looks at some former members of the 26-character set that are no longer written.  Perhaps this little jaunt through the ABC’s doesn’t fascinate everyone—but for me, it’s a busman’s holiday.]

BOOK SUMMARY

[The following précis of Alphabetical appeared in the February 2015 issue of The BookBrowse Review, https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/3174/alphabetical.]

Michael Rosen takes you on an unforgettable adventure through the history of the alphabet in twenty-six vivid chapters, fizzing with personal anecdotes and fascinating facts

How on Earth did we fix upon our twenty-six letters, what do they really mean, and how did we come to write them down in the first place?

Michael Rosen takes you on an unforgettable adventure through the history of the alphabet in twenty-six vivid chapters, fizzing with personal anecdotes and fascinating facts. Starting with the mysterious Phoenicians and how sounds first came to be written down, he races on to show how nonsense poems work, pins down the strange story of OK, traces our five lost letters and tackles the tyranny of spelling, among many many other things. His heroes of the alphabet range from Edward Lear to Phyllis Pearsall (the inventor of the A-Z), and from the two scribes of Beowulf to rappers. Each chapter takes on a different subject - whether it’s codes, umlauts or the writing of dictionaries. Rosen’s enthusiasm for letters positively leaps off the page, whether it’s the story of his life told through the typewriters he’s owned or a chapter on jokes written in a string of gags and word games.

This is the book for anyone who’s ever wondered why Hawaiian only has a thirteen-letter alphabet or how exactly to write down the sound of a wild raspberry.

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REVIEW
by Kate Braithwaite

[The BookBrowse Review of February 2015 also published this review of the book; it’s available at https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/3174/alphabetical#reviews.] 

Covering a variety of topics for each letter of the alphabet, this book is for all lovers of the English language.

He might be best known for the children’s classic board book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt [Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2009], but it’s a lifetime love of all things language that Michael Rosen, the British novelist, poet and broadcaster demonstrates in his latest book, Alphabetical, How Every Letter Tells a Story.

Arranged in twenty-six chapters organized from A to Z, Rosen has produced a fascinating and eclectic mix of history, humor and trivia about the English alphabet and how we use it.

In the first chapter, A is for Alphabet, Rosen traces the history of the written word beginning with the Egyptians, Phoenicians and Semites and moving on to the Greeks and the Romans. Adopting an accessible and conversational style he takes his reader on the journey through Old and Middle English, the Great Vowel Shift and the invention of the printing press. Each individual letter is also given its own potted history at the beginning of the corresponding chapter. The letter J, for example, Rosen tells us, is “the Johnny-come-lately of the alphabet,” being regarded by Samuel Johnson in 1755 as a “lower order” letter and a variant of the letter I.

For the historically minded, chapters such as P is for Pitman, Q is for Qwerty and Z is for Zipcodes provide entertaining stories of the men who gave the world shorthand, the typewriter and postal and zip codes respectively. For the more humorously inclined, J is for Jokes contains example after example of alphabetical wordplay such as “Why can’t pirates learn the alphabet? They get lost at C” and “Why has the alphabet got only twenty-five letters at Christmas? [sing] No-el, no-el, no-el, no-e-e-el.” And in U is for Umlats, Rosen amuses with the story of how Häagen Dazs ice cream was named. Anyone wondering which two words contain all five vowels in alphabetical order will find the answer in G is for Greek.

Reading Alphabetical, it is impossible not to be impressed by how widely Rosen casts his net gathering alphabetical facts, trivia and jokes as well as writing intelligently and informatively about more serious topics such as the teaching of reading and the impact of new technologies on our use of language.

In T is for Txtspk, for example, he writes about telegrams and texting. In S is for Symbols, he outlines the history of semaphore, Morse code, Braille and the symbols ampersat @, ampersand & and the ubiquitous hashtag #.

With such a range of topics covered it is perhaps inevitable that some chapters will interest one set of readers more than others. Fortunately the structure of the book means that Alphabetical can be read in any order, while Rosen’s informal style and use of anecdotes make the whole a cohesive experience for those who like to start at the beginning and finish at the end.

Some readers might find Rosen to be trying to do too much. At times the subjects he covers link only tenuously to the chapter letter. In I for Improvisation, for instance, he hops from animal noises to apostrophes to forms of address, seemingly at random. Inevitably some topics are touched on only lightly; for a more in-depth understanding of the history of the English language readers might want to turn to more specialist scholars of language such as David Crystal or Seth Lerer.

That said, Alphabetical is a pleasing and interesting read: the kind of book where a lover of language will find information entertainingly presented and where even the most knowledgeable will likely learn something new. 

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“AT LAST, I KNOW MY ABCs!”
by Carlos Lozada

[I first learned of Rosen’s book when I was staying in Washington, D.C., to look after my ailing mother six years ago.  Mom was a subscriber to the Washington Post, which I read daily while I was with her.  The WaPo review of Alphabetical was published in the 15 February 2015 edition (Sec. B [“Outlook”]).]

Now I know my ABCs, next time won’t you sing with me?

If you’ve ever chanted the alphabet song or taught it to a child, you’ve lied there at the end. You don’t know your ABCs — not even close. Sure, you know the order of the letters; congratulations. But do you know when we started using capital letters? Or how a wavy line with five peaks in a 4,000-year-old Egyptian hieroglyph became our M? Or for that matter, do you know, as They Might Be Giants has so sagely asked, who put the alphabet in alphabetical order?

Michael Rosen knows his ABCs. A poet, novelist and host of the BBC radio show “Word of Mouth,” he has spent a lifetime pondering and deciphering this “cunning code,” as he calls it. In “Alphabetical,” he doesn’t just explore the creation, evolution, pronunciation and uses of each letter throughout the centuries, but digresses into delightful tales of the personalities who shaped the English alphabet into what it has finally become. Though I shouldn’t say “finally.” In Rosen’s telling, letters are born, grow, fight, change or die. Don’t count on these 26 letters being the last word.

Rosen is an alphabet anarchist. He regards rules of spelling and usage as arrangements of convenience — and temporary ones at that. “At any given moment in time, a writing system is asked, by the people who know how to use it, to perform tasks,” Rosen writes. “If any of these tasks break down because the symbols don’t work or are thought to be insufficient or redundant, then it will follow that people will invent new symbols and processes for writing and reading.” Just about anything that causes individuals’ lives to change — war, migration, technology, industry, education, government — can propel changes in the alphabet.

“Alphabetical” is organized into 26 chapters (surprise), each devoted to one letter. They begin  identically, with a brief explanation of a letter’s origins, name, uses and pronunciations. In creating letters, the Phoenicians and the Greeks are usually at work early, with the Romans jumping in late, adding the serifs and probably taking too much credit. Rosen’s descriptions betray his nerdy excitement — “The Phoenician ‘Q’ from 1000 BCE was ‘qoph’ which possibly meant ‘monkey,’ possibly ‘a ball of wool’!” — and also make you reconsider the purpose of individual letters. “If spelling were a matter of purely rational divvying-out of letters to match sounds,” he explains, “then all soft ‘s’ sounds would be indicated with ‘s,’ and all hard ‘k’ sounds with the ‘k;’ the ‘c’ could be buried with Caesar.” And he refers to the Great Vowel Shift — the period between 1400 and 1600 A.D. when pronunciation of the letter A went from “ah” to “ay” and when E morphed from “ay” to “ee,” among other changes — with a reverence some might reserve for the Treaty of Westphalia or the Big Bang.

But with each letter, Rosen also veers off course, using the chapters as excuses to explore whatever he finds instructive or entertaining. In the chapter “D is for Disappeared Letters,” for example, he uses the opening lines of “Beowulf” to show how letters such as “yogh” and “wynn” have left us. In “J is for Jokes,” he explains why the alphabet has only 25 letters at Christmastime (“No-el, no-el, no-el, no-e-e-el”). And in “U is for Umlaut,” he destroys my faith in ice cream by explaining that the corporate name Häagen-Dazs “doesn’t mean anything to anyone anywhere in any language.” There’s a scoop for you.

So, consciously or not, the book’s organization tracks the author’s vision of his subject: basic predictability interspersed with enormous variations, sudden leaps and barely grazing tangents. It also seems to be a book Rosen was born to write. In endearing asides, he recalls quizzing his father with the toughest words he could find in the dictionary (“How could he possibly know the meaning of ‘heterostrophic’?”) and sitting by his mother as she typed, watching how “her long fingers hammered away, how the metal letters stuck on their thin arms flailed to and fro, how the ribbon jumped up and down, and the ribbon’s wheels jigged around.” Rosen also gets nostalgic about a two-week typing course he took long ago: “All day we did the exercises, ‘frf’, ‘juj’, ‘kik’, ‘ded.’ Hours and hours forcing my mind, fingers, keys and letters to work along in synch. I loved it.”

Too many books take us deep inside an excruciatingly specific subject — a year, a speech, an object — and claim its outsize importance. (The titles are usually something like “[Name of the Thing]: The [Category of the Thing] That Shaped the Modern World.”) Rosen occasionally comes close, suggesting that the alphabet tells “the story of global power,” which is all about “how people in power have tried to make their messages secret whilst trying to read the secret messages of others.” Even so, he has a good case: Humanity’s transition from drawing pictures on walls to inventing symbols that match sounds was a true revolution. Rosen doesn’t have to tell us how momentous his subject is. His stories are convincing enough.

Still, for a guy so captivated by these 26 characters, Rosen can easily imagine a world without the alphabet — or at least a world in which its importance is greatly diminished. The power of alphabetical order, with us at least since Zenodotus organized the Library of Alexandria in the late third century B.C., has eroded in the age of Google and Wikipedia, Rosen argues. “When we use search engines,” he writes, “we don’t run our thumbs down any real, virtual or metaphorical alphabet.” And if the alphabet ceases to be the way we classify human knowledge, “why should the alphabetical order of letters survive?”

Besides, Rosen reminds us, the Chinese have not felt the need to develop an alphabet, “and the Chinese are doing just fine.”

The power to spread and transform the alphabet — once concentrated among medieval scribes, British and French printers, or Christian missionaries spreading words to spread the Word — has been democratized. Now, Rosen exults, with tablets and smartphones, “the smallest building blocks of the shared written language (i.e. print) are more in your hands . . . than they have ever been.”

And that is where he believes they should reside. The author is contemptuous of language reformers or protectors. “When people object to the way other people speak, it rarely has any linguistic logic to it,” he writes. “It is nearly always because of the way that particular linguistic feature is seen to belong to a cluster of social features that are disliked.” In other words, reformers are snobs. And when you read that George Bernard Shaw once dismissed apostrophes as “uncouth bacilli,” it’s hard to disagree. 

But how do we know what’s right, then? For instance, is it “a historian” or “an historian, with the silent H? Rosen doesn’t care: “You choose. And once you’ve chosen, please don’t tell someone else that they’ve got it wrong.”

So let “Alphabetical” inspire you to improvise, innovate and disrupt with letters. We’re always beta-testing the alphabet, anyway. Rosen, for one, wants to add a letter for the sound at the beginning of words such as “about” and “America” (known linguistically as the schwa), and seems confident it’ll happen. And when you find yourself staring far too long at the shape of an F or comparing where you press your tongue to pronounce L vs. D, you’ll know you’ve opened an unusual book. After reading it, it’s hard to look at a keyboard, a street sign or even your handwriting in quite the same way.

For that you can thank Michael Rosen, a true man of letters.

[Carlos Lozada is associate editor and nonfiction book critic of the Washington Post.]

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“HISTORY REVIEW: LOVE OF LANGUAGE TUMBLES OFF PAGES OF ‘ALPHABETICAL’”
by Alexandra Witze

[The review below ran in the Dallas Morning News on 28 February 2015; it’s online at https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/books/2015/02/28/history-review-love-of-language-tumbles-off-pages-of-alphabetical/.]

All, be comforted by what Michael Rosen has to tell you: Language is an ever-shifting experience. Your misspellings and grammatical errors will probably be acceptable a century from now. Your kid will learn to read just fine, whether or not you ever crack phonics.

Rosen is a poet and a children’s author, and so he squirrels away words like ordinary people hoard chocolates. His love of language tumbles across the pages of his new book, which is an A-to-Z treasury of linguistic oddities. Reading it is like listening to an erudite uncle hold forth on everything from accent marks to zingers.

Each of the 26 chapters first gives some background of a particular letter. We learn that the ancient Semites saw an archer’s bow in the shape of an S, and that Charlemagne’s scribes were the first to introduce a lowercase n. Rosen then begins playing with letters, rhymes and repeating sounds. You, like me, might be astonished to learn there is a song that goes “Ging-gang-goolie-goolie-goolie, ging gang goo.”

The real meat comes in the topics Rosen chooses to explore for each letter. “C is for Ciphers” investigates how to create secret codes, for anything from national security to kids’ messages on the playground. For Rosen, the fun is in how such exercises subvert our ordinary understanding of lettering. “Cryptographers invent ciphers and use the alphabet by draining it of its purpose,” he writes. In so doing, they place its real meaning into perspective.

At first glance, “E is for e.e. cummings” would seem to be about capitalization, but this is Rosen, so it is more about playing with language itself. Cummings did not just change capitalization and spelling — he experimented with visual aspects of lettering, arranging words into particular shapes to convey meaning via appearance, as well. Anyone can do this: the word bed looks like a bed with a headboard and footboard, and you can draw eyes inside the two o’s in look to make the verb do what it means. Take your initials and see if they form a visually pleasing monogram.

Meanwhile, “V is for Vikings” tackles an entirely different type of visual language: that of ancient runes. Runic alphabets are composed of letters corresponding to objects, so that you might recite them as fehu (meaning money), uruz (ox), thurisaz (giant), ansuz (god) and so on. Some runic letters eventually became incorporated into the Old English alphabet, like the th sound of the letter known as thorn. But then early printers made the thorn look a lot like a y. The result: quaint tourist places named things like “Ye Olde Shoppe,” which was supposed to be “The Olde Shoppe” until the thorn became a y.

Rosen’s tales rely heavily on such British examples, and the American reader may grow a bit weary of hearing about what it was like to learn spelling and grammar in London in the early 1950s. But Rosen’s sheer joy in language is infectious, and Alphabetical is well-suited for dipping into chapters out of order, exploring vowels and consonants in any combination.

Even more refreshing, Rosen does not lecture about the moral failure of modern texting and tweeting. Hashtags, @ signs, and other abbreviations work for him #justfine. Language evolves from Dickens to iPhones. After all, they are our letters, and we can do what we want with them.

[Alexandra Witze, who has never enjoyed the x’s and z’s in her name, is a science journalist based in Boulder, Colorado.]

*  *  *  *
“AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL ROSEN” 

[The BookBrowse Review also ran an author’s interview in February 2015, posted online at https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/2598/michael-rosen.]

Michael Rosen muses on the mysteries of the alphabet, a topic he explores in Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story

As daily viewers of films, we regularly accept something odd: the focus pull. We look at a scene in which, say, there is some blurry stuff on one side of the screen while in the distance someone is going about their business. Then, for no immediate apparent reason, the blurry stuff stops being blurry and we suddenly start to see someone or something who has some kind of relation to that first figure. Without the use of lenses, we’re able to do something similar with the alphabet. For much of the time, particularly when we’re reading, the alphabet is out of focus. Unlike the blurry film, though, it is more as if we both look with it and through it at the same time!

So, when we’re learning to read, we learn any or all of these: the names of letters, the sounds of letters, the sounds of combinations of letters and we learn how in English, the match between letters and sounds is not 100% regular. Sometimes letters can denote different sounds: the ‘ch’ in ‘machine’ asks us to make a different sound from the ‘ch’ in ‘chapter’. Sometimes a given sound can be denoted in different ways: in most dialects of English ‘crow’ rhymes with ‘though’, ‘so’, ‘sew’, ‘beau’ or ‘oh’. Yet, we would never be able to read for the purpose of understanding what we’re reading, if we paid close attention to this kind of thing as we read. In some way or another, we have to use what we know in order to not notice that we’re using it.

That said, there are times when we pull focus on it, and the letters as letters figure. Older readers may remember ‘letraset’, sheets of letters which we could stick on to paper so that we could produce swanky looking greetings cards or ‘print ready’ copy of our student samizdat. We had to concentrate on the letteriness of letters. With predictive test urging me to write ‘leatheriness’ rather than ‘letteriness’ I have to pull focus with great persistence in order to write what I want to write.

‘Alphabetical order’ is another. No one knows for certain why or how the letters became ordered as A, B, C etc. All that can be discerned is the history of that order going back to the Phoenicians or ‘Semitic’ peoples before them, who cracked the idea that you could use a squiggle to denote a sound rather than an object. But why put the squiggles in an order? We’ve found it useful though. One Zenodotus, librarian at the ancient library of Alexandria is one of the first known alphabetic classifiers. He sorted the scrolls into the alphabetic order of their authors. When we run our finger through an index, we pull focus on the letters.

We come to think of alphabetic order as sacred: the hymn runs ‘Alpha and omega he’, after all and yet the machine I’m using to write all this, is resolutely, proudly, divergently non-alphabetic. And there lies a story . . .

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“‘ALPHABETICAL’ TELLS THE STORY BEHIND EVERY LETTER, A TO Z”
by Scott Simon

[WNYC, a New York City affiliate of National Public Radio (NPR), broadcast an interview with Rosen on 7 February 2015, posted at https://www.npr.org/transcripts/384108640.]  

SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Twenty-six letters in the alphabet that we use, but how did they get there? Why do they look the way they do? Michael Rosen, the former Children’s Laureate of Great Britain, and the host of “Word Of Mouth” on BBC’s Radio 4 has a new book that tries to tell that story from A to Z - or zed, if you prefer - “Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells A Story.” He joins us from London. Thanks so much for being with us.

MICHAEL ROSEN: Thank you for having me.

SIMON: So how do we as a species begin to put down scrolls for the sounds we use to express ourselves?

ROSEN: Well, of course, nobody knows exactly why. All they can see is that certain peoples round about 4,000 years ago started to do it. They may have done it separately or they may have communicated with each other in one way or another. So we know that the ancient Egyptians - we always say they write in hieroglyphs - but it’s quite clear when you look at some of those signs, if you like, that some of them were used, as we would say, phonetically. So let’s just imagine for a moment we had a sign for apple, and it looked a bit like a diagram of an apple, a little bit like a heart with a stalk sticking out of it, and that’s fine. And then every time we see that we say apple. But then along comes some a clever guy - or perhaps it’s a woman - who looks at that [sign] and says I’ll tell you what, instead of just saying apple every time we see that we make A sound at the beginning of it. So we can have an apple sign for A, and let’s say we can have a pear sign in sign for P and lemon sign for L and so on.

Now simultaneously, or around about the same time some folks were doing that, a little bit further - a little bit off from Egypt in an area we’d perhaps describe as these days as the Lebanon or maybe more into Israel - and these Semitic peoples came up with another trick, where instead of just working from the hieroglyph, they did a squiggle. So this sort of phonetic breakthrough was being made in different ways and different places about 4,000 years ago.

SIMON: Most used letter in the alphabet, especially these days, is probably E. It began life as a stick man?

ROSEN: Well, yes. I mean, when we say begin life we have to be careful. I mean, yes, when we say begin life, yes, that’s right that it began life amongst the Phoenicians. When you draw up the Phoenician alphabet - I’ve put it in the book, but, you know, people can find it online - you know, have some fun. Look through that alphabet - that old, ancient Phoenician alphabet - and see if you can see things. I mean, I rather like the D. And a D - you know, our capital D, which is a straight line with a semi-circle, seems to have begun life as a triangle. It did make a D sound according to the Phoenicians and they called it a dalet or door. And you say well, why is a triangle a door? Well, I don’t know whether I’m being fanciful, but have a think about a tent door. Is that a triangle? Perhaps it is.

SIMON: Why do we need a K when we have a C?

ROSEN: Oh, well, when we get into needs, then we really have a problem because just starting off from a nicely irrational way of spelling and writing - in a sense, you know, we're not very regular either way, are we? We’re not very regular in saying that this letter denotes this particular sound. So if you take a C, you know, at the beginning of ceiling, it sounds like a S and at the beginning of cap, it sounds like a K. And so, you know, we double up in that way. And then similarly, we can make sounds in different ways. I mean, you take the Romans - they managed to do without the letter V, the letter W and the letter J. They may have sometimes made a sound. So if you take the Latin word for a horse was equus, which they spelled E-Q-U-U-S, so they made the U signify a W sound, which we say we normally use a W for. And the U sound made the ooh sound there. So they used the same letter to make different sounds, even when it was bang next to each other.

SIMON: I’m assuming a thousand years from now, the alphabet we’re using now will be considered antique. But what about a hundred years from now?

ROSEN: I wonder - I’m pretty sure most of the letters will be there and probably just by convention they'll be in that order for a hundred years or more. Should by chance our pronunciations change very much - and over a thousand years they may well do so - then certain combinations of letters, or even the letters themselves, may fall into disuse. So, for example, we might imagine that people will get tired of writing QU every time and think, well, I’ll drop the U. So that would be a very easy evolution that one might imagine.

SIMON: Michael Rosen, his new book A-Z - “Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells A Story.” Thanks very much for being with us.

ROSEN: Thank you for having me, Scott 

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“HOW OK BECAME OUR ONE TRUE UNIVERSAL COLLOQUIALISM”
by Michael Rosen

[Slate, the online magazine, published an excerpt from Alphabetical on 18 February 2015 (https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/the-origins-of-ok-how-ok-became-a-universal-colloquialism.html).  It’s the passage in which Rosen looks at what may be the English expression with the most obscure etymology—and the most possible explanations of its origin.  ‘OK’ (or as I choose to write it, ‘okay’), also must be the most widespread American expression ever coined; it’s used to one extent or another in almost every other language on Earth and is pretty close to universally understood.

[This passage from his book also give ROTters a sample of Rosen’s humor and his breezy writing style.]

Excerpted from Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story, by Michael Rosen, out now from Counterpoint.

Is it OK to write OK, Ok, Okay, and ok? And should people who say, “Okily-dokily” be given a custodial sentence?

When zoologists looked at the duck-billed platypus, they had problems. They had their way of classifying animals, but this beast didn’t fit. What’s more, it looked like a hoax. The duck-billed platypus was fine—it’s still fine; it just goes on being a duck-billed platypus. It doesn’t wonder what kind of animal it is.

OK is a duck-billed platypus.

We have no fixed way of writing OK because we don’t know whether it is two initials or a transcription of a non-English word. Either way, it sounds like two letters. It may well have started out in life as an interjection—like uh-huh—but it has now risen to the status of a word. Look at it: One moment, it’s being adjectival and the next, adverbial:

“You’re an OK sort of a guy.” (adjective)
“If you can run OK, you’ll be picked for the team.” (adverb)

“I’ve given him the OK to run.” (noun)
“I’ve okayed him for the race.” (verb)

Unlike the platypus, OK lives everywhere. There are few places left in the world where an “OK!” accompanied by a smile and a nod would be misunderstood. And unlike the platypus, it can acquire appendages: A-OK, okey-dokey, hokie-dokie, and the aforesaid okily-dokily.

It is clearly a popular, useful, and powerful word. It works. It even has its own hand-sign: tip of the first finger on to the tip of the thumb to make an O shape, the other fingers raised, though that seems to be an OK-plus, a better-than-just-OK kind of OK. You might have thought, with all that going for it, that we would be proud that humanity had invented a noise that could do so much for so many. Not so. In many circles, it is a despised little expression, seen as lazy, imprecise, slangy, and—in some countries—an unwelcome Americanism. It’s a low-status word even when used by high-status people. If a prime minister or president wants to sound informal, he or she will use OK. In a formal setting, as in a news broadcast, it won’t make the grade. You’ll be told to not use it in a job application or in an essay on the causes of the First World War.

There isn’t a clear answer why OK hasn’t been allowed into the academy that is formal prose writing. I suspect it’s a cluster of connotations to do with its origins and its sound. I’ll get on to the theories of its precise origins in a moment, but whatever these are, OK took up a regular posting in the informal speech of non-posh Americans just as “gee!” and “wow!” have. Once a word is situated in a place like that, it’s hard for it to fight its way into formal writing. Whatever its virtues, standard English is also a code that signals that the writer has had a particular kind of education. A rule like “Don’t use ‘OK’ in your essays” does this job.

I think something else is involved: the sound. Perhaps we see some initialed expressions as not being the full or real thing—OK for note-taking and chat but not for proper writing. No matter what its true origins are, we hear OK as two letters and that’s part of how we think of it. The irony here would be that OK may be a “loan word,” “borrowed” from another language and kept, and fully entitled to keep its place alongside robots, verandahs, and culottes.

My first go at the etymology of OK was when I was about 6. I knew then that the word OK came from sauce bottles. But however much I would like my bottle of OK Sauce to be the explanation of the word’s origins, wishing it won’t make it so. There is a whole bunch of contenders for the real origin: from a Greek expression, “ola kala” (meaning “it’s good”); as a loan word from the American Choctaw nation, “oke” or “okeh” (meaning “it’s so”); a French dockers’ expression, “au quai” (meaning “it’s all right to send to the quay”); another French dockers’ expression, “aux Cayes” (meaning “to or at Cayes,” a place renowned for good rum); a railroad freight agent, Obadiah Kelly, who put his initials on documents he had approved; an expression meaning “all right” circulating in the languages of West African peoples; an anglicization of the Scots expression “och aye”; and finally—the one I was told when I wondered about brown sauce labelling—that it was a mock initializing of the misspelled “orl korrekt” or “oll korrect,” something that young swells from Boston liked to do in the 1830s.

Its first written, testified use is by the Democrats during the presidential election of 1840. Their candidate, Martin Van Buren, had the nickname of “Old Kinderhook” (after his birthplace in New York state), and his supporters called themselves the “OK Club.” This may have helped the spread of the expression, but it didn’t help Martin Van Buren. He lost the election.

I have another suggestion: It comes from all these sources. The theory I’m working to here is that some expressions and words don’t come from one source alone. As one example amongst thousands, the expression “the full monty” can claim several origins. Perhaps what happens is that a word or expression starting out in one place chimes with the same or a similar one in another, and together they snowball into widespread usage. One of the main causes of language change is that people hear something that sounds like something that they already say and they add that to their vocabulary or “linguistic repertoire.” Colloquial words often catch on when you think that saying a given word will make you sound good to others when you say it.

In the case of OK, the main cause of its spreading has been “mateyness.” If I say it, I will sound more matey, more affable, more “with you” than indifferent or hostile to you. One of the key times and places to indicate mateyness is when peoples who perceive each other as different meet up and wish to be friendly. A shorthand way of saying “things are fine” is very useful. Saying good in someone else’s language is an excellent way of showing friendliness. My first visits to France as a teenager were constantly sprinkled with me saying bon. In the list of possible contenders for OK’s origin, there seem to be thousands, if not millions, of small encounters in which saying OK would have done that job very well. If I’m right, OK would be a symbol of “interculturalism,” the way peoples of different origins share culture.

Even so, let’s hear it for the Boston wags. According to Allen Walker Read, there was a fad in the 1830s for abbreviations of expressions said in local accents and dialects: “KY” for “know yuse,” “NS” for “nuff said,” “OW” for “oll wright,” and even initials for misspellings: “KG,” for “know go” and “NC” for “nuff ced.” It sounded funny and cool to say OK for “orl korrekt.” As it happens, it seems as if plenty of peoples were saying something like OK well before that, but it would be the encounters between these peoples, along with the snappy OK sign, which made it stick.

[As a closing, I want to direct ROTters to an earlier post with some connection to an examination of the Latin alphabet.  On 7 December 2011, I ran an “On Language” column from the New York Times Magazine by Ben Zimmer called “GHOTI.”  It’s about the great bugaboo of all writers of English: spelling!

[I have reserved one additional article, a review-cum-synopsis (with whimsical illustrations), from the New York Post to run on 4 November.  Because of the illustrations, it takes up more space than a straight newspaper column, so I'm posting it separately, but it contains samples of Rosen's discussions of the origins of each letter of the alphabet.  Please check back in three days for “Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story,” Part 2.]