Family Album, XXVI

Source: Famly Album

History of OK, part II

History of OK, part II


Source: www.voanews.com

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We're back with the author of the new book "OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word."

RS: Last week, Allan Metcalf explained how OK began as a joke on March 23, 1839. That was the day a Boston newspaper first used it as a humorous, misspelled abbreviation for "all correct." Other factors later helped propel OK into wider use.

AA: But not everyone thought OK was OK, says Allan Metcalf.

ALLAN METCALF: "Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, it was well-known, but there were places where it was not used. And one of them was by writers of fiction. All the good writers seemed to avoid OK, like Mark Twain, who certainly used slang, and Brett Hart. Both of them could easily have used OK. They must have known it. But they avoided it."

AA: "What did they use in its place?"

ALLAN METCALF: "Just something like 'all right' or 'that will do' or whatever else. And then there's a very interesting case. Louisa May Alcott wrote a book called 'Little Women' about twenty years after OK was invented. And, in it, there's one OK in a letter from one of the girls to her sisters.

"And then that was revised for a second edition, and OK was removed and 'cozy' was put in instead. So everything is 'cozy' instead of everything is 'OK.' So there must have been some sense that OK was too silly a term to use even in fiction."

RS: "How does OK in our vocabulary represent who we are as Americans?"

ALLAN METCALF: "One way that it represents who we are is that it represents the pragmatic sense of getting it done. Maybe not getting it done perfectly, but it's OK. But the other way began with a book published in 1967 by a guy named Thomas Harris. The book is called 'I'm OK -- You're OK.' And the book happens to be about a kind of psychology known as transactional analysis.

"Now most of us have either forgotten or never heard about transactional analysis. But that brilliant statement, 'I'm OK -- You're OK,' which happens also to be the only famous quotation ever involving OK, is one that has seeped into our American consciousness.

"And I think nowadays we as a people are much more tolerant than we used to be, partly because 'I'm OK' -- that means I can do what I want. 'You're OK' -- you can do what you want. Maybe we aren't doing the same thing, but that's OK."

RS: "And speaking of OK, do you think OK also has not only a past longevity, but a future?"

ALLAN METCALF: "It's hard to imagine a world without OK, and I mean not just America without OK but any other part of the world. I've received a few anecdotes about OK once my book was published. It was used in Polish. That's one anecdote. Another in French.

"I'd be very pleased if your listeners would send me any stories about how OK is used in their countries. I'm thinking of a sequel called 'OK Around the World.'"

RS: "We'll try to help you on that."

AA: "Speaking of these other languages, you mention that there are similar terms in other languages. Did any of those come before OK, or have they all emerged since then?"

ALLAN METCALF: "The Greek language has an expression something like 'olla kalla' which means 'all good,' which has been around in Greek for a couple of thousand years. And so when OK was imported-exported to Greece, the Greeks thought 'Oh, that's an abbreviation of one of our expressions.' But there's absolutely no connection leading from Greece to the American Boston in 1839."

AA: "And there are so many ways it's written: O.K., OK without periods, o-k-a-y. Is there one you prefer?"

ALLAN METCALF: "Well, for my book, since I wanted to emphasize OK, I used capital O, capital K without periods. But those other spellings that you mention are also legitimate. The original OK was 'o.k.' And if you want to make it look more like an ordinary word, you spell it 'okay.'"

RS:    Allan Metcalf is the author of "OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word."

AA:    Let us know if you use OK in your language.

RS:    OK?

AA:    Go to voanews.com/wordmaster, click on the Contact Us link and tell us your story. We'll forward it to Allan Metcalf.

RS:    That's WORDMASTER for this week. With Avi Arditti, I’m Rosanne Skirble.

New York: Biking the Big Apple

Source: Speak Up
Language Level: Advanced
Standard: American accent

Biking the Big Apple

New York City is well known for its fast pace of life, busy streets and heavy traffic. Of all the places in the world, the Big Apple seems an unlikely starting point for a leisurely bicycle ride. Yet New York was listed in a recent survey as the third-best City in the USA for cycling. This is also the only place in the world where bike riders have 24-hour access to the underground transport system. As the number of cyclists increase, New York’s drivers become more aware of them, which mean fewer accidents. The city is much more bike-friendly than many people realize, says 24-year-old Jesse McDonough, a guide with bicycle tour company Bike the Big Apple.

Jesse McDonough

Standard: American accent:

You know, you can get can anywhere on a bike in certainly less than an hour, usually a lot shorter. The cars are used to having people stepping out in the road, used to having carts and truck and things like that in the way and in most cases they’re not going fast enough to really harm you anyway. So yeah, it’s…as long as you, you know, assert yourself and own the road, it is a very bike-friendly city. And also I think the system of…of bike paths…is improving a lot, as well, there’s a great organization called Transportation Alternatives that really pushes a lot for a bike-friendly city.

OVERCROWDING

There are already an estimated 100.000 cyclists riding through New York each day. By the year 2030 the city’s population will have grown to around nine million and, without a big increase in public transport and bike lanes, the streets will be unable to cope with all the additional traffic.

Manhattan is already increasing the number of bike lanes on its busy streets and currently has around 40 kilometres of bike paths totally free from motorized vehicles. Avoiding the worst traffic and rush hours. Bike the Big Apples takes advantage of the freedom for cyclists to offer visitors a unique, close-up view of the city’s culture and people. Most of the regular tours take four to five hours and begin at one of two different bike shop in Manhattan. Led by an experienced guide, visitors cycle along quiet roads and bike paths, through different neighborhoods and parks, along rivers and over bridges. Fortunately, New York is a fairly flat city with very few hills. And the average speed is only six kilometers an hour, so you don’t need to be particularly fit to enjoy the trip! The average age of riders on Bike the Big Apple tours is around 40 years old, but children as young as 10 and pensioners in their seventies have enjoyed the riders. Most importantly, in seven years of cycle tours, no-one has ever got hurt. Bike the Big Apple proves that finding your way around New York can be easier on two wheels, rather than four – especially with a guide who knows the shortcuts and history of this fascinating city.

Jesse McDonough:

I love it. I mean, you know, I love being on a bicycle and I was a history major in college and New York’s got some really great history and some interesting history. And then its current events…always champing, it’s hard to keep up, reading the metro section of the newspaper every day. And I personally love it. And as I do the tours myself, I see things change and develop each time, you know, I’m at the same location. So I mean it’s great for me, you know, I just learn more each tour myself and then get to pass that on to the riders.

Cycling in the City (No audio)

Bike the Bike Apple is the only company to offer fully-escorted, year-round bicycle tours through all five boroughs of New York City. The most popular tour – Tour A, the Ethnic Apple Tour – travels 15 miles in 7 hours and costs $75. For full information telephone +1- 201-287-1133 or visit www.bikethebigapple.com if you feel confident, why not hire your own bike for the day? Rates from $5,99 an hour up to a maximum of $24,99 per day; www.pedalpusherbikeshop.com Transport Alternatives campaigns for safer cycling and provides up-to-date information about biking in New York City; www.trasalt.org if you are keen on biking and cinema, remember that every May sees the start of New York City’s Bicycle Film Festival: www.bicyclefilmfetiva.com

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Seriously: 'OK' Began as a Joke in a Newspaper in Boston in 1839 Part I

Source: www.voanews.com

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We talk with Allan Metcalf, author of the new book "OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word."

RS: And not just the greatest word, in his view.

ALLAN METCALF: "America's most important word. The most successful American export to the rest of the world. And also the embodiment of the American philosophy, the American way of thinking."

AA: "All this, packed into two letters."

ALLAN METCALF: "Yes, that's the beauty of it and that's the economy of it. One of the two aspects of the American view of the world is pragmatism, getting things done. Even if they're not perfect, they're OK. And the nice thing about OK is it doesn't imply that everything is perfect or beautiful or wonderful. In fact, it's a neutral affirmation. When you say 'That's OK' or someone asks you 'How are you?' and you say 'I'm OK,' it doesn't mean that you're in perfect health. But it also doesn't mean that you're sick.

RS: "OK [is] just two letters of the alphabet. Do they stand for something?"

ALLAN METCALF: "Well, they do, as a matter of fact. One of the curious things about OK that makes it require a whole book to tell its story is that it began as a joke. It was on March 23, 1839, in a Boston newspaper, that the newspaper first used 'o.k.' and explained those as an abbreviation for 'all correct.' And, of course, the joke was that 'o' is not the beginning of 'all' and 'k' is not the beginning of 'correct.' So this thing supposedly all correct was not all correct."

AA: "Kind of a sarcastic joke, or what was it meant to be?"

ALLAN METCALF: "Well, it was not so sarcastic. It turned out that at that time in Boston there were all sorts of supposedly humorous abbreviations in the newspapers of that sort. And most of these abbreviations completely disappeared. And you could well imagine that they would, because they were rather stupid.

"But it turns out that in the next year, 1840, in the American presidential election of 1840, a man named Martin Van Buren was running for re-election. He happened to come from Kinderhook, New York, and so somebody thought of calling him 'Old Kinderhook' and then thought of founding clubs supporting him throughout the country, called OK Clubs. OK, Old Kinderhook, is OK, all correct or all right. And that suddenly gave continued life and prominence to OK.

"And then there was a third, very strange thing that happened. During that presidential election year, Martin Van Burne's predecessor as president had been Andrew Jackson, and so there was an attack on Andrew Jackson by an opponent of Van Buren. The attack said that Jackson couldn't spell, so that Jackson would look at a document and if he approved of it, he would write OK on it, meaning it was all correct. Now it turns out that that was a complete hoax.

"It turns out that Andrew Jackson actually could spell pretty well, and the curator of the documents of Andrew Jackson confirms that he never wrote OK on a document. But as a result of that story, within about twenty years people really began marking OK on documents, as they have done ever since. And so it took on a practical, down-to-earth aspect that ultimately developed into the OK we know today."

RS: But Allan Metcalf says the idea that OK began as a joke kept people trying to guess where it really came from.

ALLAN METCALF: "The OK-as-Andrew-Jackson's hoax was the first misleading statement of its origins. And then around the 1880s a professor decided that the true origin was from the Choctaw Indian language, where they had an expression like OK which means 'it is so,' and for various reasons that was proposed as the true explanation for OK. They spelled it 'okeh,' and the only American president ever to have a PhD, Woodrow Wilson, thought that was the correct explanation, so he would mark o-k-e-h on documents."

AA: And, as we will hear next week, there is more to "OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word." Allan Metcalf is an English professor at MacMurray College in Illinois and executive secretary of the American Dialect Society.

RS:    And that's WORDMASTER for this week. Transcripts and MP3s of our program are at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti. I'm Rosanne Skirble.

Go

Source: Speak Up

Standard: British and American accent

Language level: Basic

Go words!

GO! GO! GO!

The English Language loves to take a simple Word and give it multiple meanings. Take go, for example, which doesn’t only mean to leave or travel from  A to B.

We meet a man in the street who complains his car won’t go! That means he can’t start the engine. The man is very angry; in fact, he goes bananas, that is, he becomes crazy. That’s just the beginning: a bomb goes off, or explodes, and yet fires go out, or stop burning. Food goes off, too, but that means it’s rotten. A young man can ask a girl to go out with him (be his girlfriend). They then go steady (have a long term relationship). Unfortunately, things go wrong. The girl goes off with another man (leaves him). So the boyfriend goes to pieces (has a mental breakdown). Yet life goes on (continues), even though it’s touch and go (an uncertain situation) for a while.

BURN, BABY, BURN!

Burn is another example: you burn wood or coal on a fire. The fire burns out when there’s no more wood or coal. Life is very stressful today and many people suffer from burnout: they are so exhausted, they don’t have the energy to go on.

Record companies are also stressed out: they’re losing money because so many people are illegally downloading music from the internet and burning their own CDs.

Finally, a piece of advice: if you are thinking of making big changes in your life, don’t burn your bridges – that is, don’t eliminate the possibility of a return.

Your dreams will come true...

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwsvXdQ_HbU&feature=related


I wish may your dreams come true, a wonderful weekend, health, peace and love. Share it for friends, and all the best. See you tomorrow, of course, if God willing. 

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Source: www.voanews.com

Now, the VOA Special English program WORDS AND THEIR STORIES.

As we told you last week, every American state has a nickname. Here are some more of them.

Idaho is known as the Gem State. This is not because it has diamonds but because it believes it is the jewel of the western Rocky Mountains. Illinois is the Land of Lincoln. It is named for Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president who led the nation through the Civil War in the eighteen sixties. The Midwestern state of Indiana is called theHoosier State, but nobody is quite sure why.

One story is that the word was used to mean poor farmers or uneducated people. No wonder the state legislature instead calls Indiana the Crossroads of America. Iowa's nickname, theHawkeye State, is in honor of Black Hawk, an Indian chief who spent most of his life in neighboring Illinois!

Kansas also has a "hawkish" nickname: the Jayhawk State. Jayhawkers were free-state guerrilla fighters opposed to the pro-slavery fighters in the years before the Civil War.

Kentucky is the Bluegrass State. Bluegrass is really bright green but looks bluish from a distance. Louisiana is the Bayou State. A bayou is a slow-moving stream. Hundreds of them flow through this southern state, and many are full of alligators!

Maine, in the nation's northeast, is the Pine Tree State because it is covered in evergreen woods. And directly across the country, on the Pacific Coast, is the state of Washington. It also has lots of evergreen trees so, not surprisingly, it is the Evergreen State.

The eastern state of Massachusetts is the Bay State. This body of water separates most of the state from famous Cape Cod.

Six state nicknames are taken from native animals. Michigan is theWolverine State. A wolverine is a small, fierce mammal. The badger is a similar and equally fierce creature and Wisconsin is the Badger State.

Neighboring Minnesota, the Gopher State, is named for a much nicer animal that builds hills and tunnels. However, the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes is written on Minnesota's vehicle license plates.

North Dakota gets its nickname, the Flickertail State not from some bird, but from a little squirrel. South Dakota takes its nickname, the Coyote State, from an animal that thinks flickertails are good to eat!

And Oregon, the Beaver State, borrows its nickname from the large, flat-tailed rodent that uses trees to build dams.

Next week, we will tell you about more state nicknames, including one that is about people's feet!

(MUSIC)

This VOA Special English program was written by Ted Landphair. I'm Barbara Klein. You can find more WORDS AND THEIR STORIES at voaspecialenglish.com.