OK：一個征服世界的拼字玩笑
"OK" may be the most widely used word on the planet. People say it in English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and dozens of other languages. But it started out as a silly joke in an American newspaper.
In the late 1830s, young people in Boston had a strange hobby. They loved making up abbreviations for deliberately misspelled phrases. "OW" stood for "oll wright" (all right), and "KY" stood for "know yuse" (no use). It was the kind of joke that only made sense if you were in on it.
On 23 March 1839, the Boston Morning Post printed "o.k." as short for "oll korrect" – a joke spelling of "all correct". Most of these abbreviations disappeared quickly, but OK got lucky.
The next year, in 1840, President Martin Van Buren was running for re-election. He came from a town called Kinderhook in New York, and his supporters nicknamed him "Old Kinderhook". They formed "OK Clubs" and used OK as a campaign slogan. Van Buren lost the election, but the word won. OK spread across the United States, and then around the world.
For a long time, nobody knew where OK really came from, and people suggested all sorts of explanations. It was only in the 1960s that an American language expert, Allen Walker Read, tracked down the old newspapers and solved the mystery.
So OK began as a misspelling, became a political slogan and ended up as one of the most useful words in the world. Not bad for a joke.
「OK」可能是全世界用得最廣的一個字。人們說英文、中文、日文、西班牙文以及其他幾十種語言時，都會用到它。可是它一開始，只是美國報紙上的一個無聊玩笑。
1830 年代末，波士頓的年輕人有個奇怪的嗜好：他們喜歡替故意拼錯的片語編縮寫。「OW」代表「oll wright」（all right，好的），「KY」代表「know yuse」（no use，沒用）。這種玩笑，只有圈內人才看得懂。
1839 年 3 月 23 日，《波士頓晨郵報》印出了「o.k.」，作為「oll korrect」的縮寫——這是「all correct（全都正確）」的玩笑拼法。這類縮寫大多很快就消失了，但 OK 運氣不錯。
隔年，也就是 1840 年，美國總統馬丁．范布倫競選連任。他來自紐約州一個叫金德胡克的小鎮，支持者替他取了個綽號叫「老金德胡克」（Old Kinderhook）。他們成立了「OK 俱樂部」，把 OK 當成競選口號。范布倫輸掉了選舉，但這個字贏了。OK 傳遍了美國，接著又傳遍全世界。
很長一段時間，沒人知道 OK 到底是怎麼來的，大家提出了各式各樣的解釋。直到 1960 年代，美國語言學家艾倫．沃克．里德找到當年的舊報紙，才解開這個謎。
就這樣，OK 從一個錯誤拼字開始，變成了政治口號，最後成了世界上最好用的字之一。對一個玩笑來說，這結局還真不錯。