Margen
Today «OK» appears in more than 200 languages. The Apollo astronauts took it to the Moon in 1969; Chinese speakers write it with two Latin letters among thousands of characters; Japanese speakers say «ō-kē». It may be the most international word alive.
In 1963, the philologist Allen Walker Read, of the University of Chicago, published six articles in American Speech that closed the debate: OK did not come from the Choctaw «okeh», the Greek «olla kalá» or the French «au quai». Read traced it back to a single editorial.
In 1840, Martin Van Buren, nicknamed «Old Kinderhook» after his home town in New York State, seized on those two letters for his re-election campaign. «OK Clubs» sprang up in dozens of cities to back him. Van Buren lost the vote, but the slogan became a word.
On March 23, 1839, Charles Gordon Greene, editor of the Boston Morning Post, ran a mocking piece against the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society. At the end he dropped a string of made-up abbreviations, spelled wrong on purpose: «i.s.b.d.» (it should be done), «g.t.d.h.d.» (give the devil his due) and, among them, «o.k.» = oll korrect. It was the newspaper fashion of the day: misspell for fun, then abbreviate.
That typographic joke outlived the paper, the candidate and the scholar who debunked every other origin.