Of all the new words to issue from the New World, the quintessential Americanism without any doubt was OK. Arguably American’s single greatest gift to international discourse, OK is the most grammatically versatile of words, able to serve as an adjective (“Lunch was OK”), verb (“Can you OK this for me?”), noun (“I need your OK on this”), interjection (“OK, I hear you”), and adverb (“We did OK”). It can carry shades of meaning that range from casual assent (“Shall we go?” “OK”), to great enthusiasm (“OK!”), to lukewarm endorsement (“The party was OK”), to a more or less meaningless filler of space (“OK, can I have your attention please?”).
But we don’t even know where it came from or how to spell it(!):
It is a curious fact that the most successful and widespread of all English words, naturalized as an affirmation into almost every language in the world, from Serbo-Croatian to Tagalog, is one that has no correct agreed spelling (it can be O.K., OK, or okay) and one whose origins are so obscure that it has been a matter of heated dispute almost since it first appeared.
He then went into detail about what those origins might’ve been. Google it if you feel so inclined.
Did this remind you of the other ever-so-versatile word? It did me, and so I was glad to see Bryson write about it 50 pages later:
After OK, fuck must be about the most versatile of all English words. It can be used to describe a multitude of conditions and phenomena, from making a mess of something (fuck up) to being casual or provocative (fuck around), to inviting or announcing a departure (fuck off), to being estimable (fucking-A), to being baffled (I’m fucked if I know), to being disgusted (fuck this), and so on and on and on.
Fuck probably reached its zenith during the Second World War. Most people are familiar with the army term snafu (short for “situation normal—all fucked up”), but there were many others in common currency then, among them fubar (“fucked up beyond all recognition”) and fubb (“fucked up beyond belief”).
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Almost related:
There was an HBO special called “Talking Funny” where for an hour Jerry Seinfeld, Louis CK, Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais discussed the craft of stand-up comedy. (It’s free online if you Google hard enough.) About 35 minutes in, Seinfeld gets asked why his comedy is “clean” and whether it has always been that way. His response was that his comedy wasn’t clean when he was “coming up,” but that changed when he realized that one of his jokes couldn’t be funny without the word “fuck.” Essentially, he saw “fuck” serving as a kind of crutch, one that suggested that the joke maybe wasn’t all that good, and one that suggested that he might’ve been acting more out of fear than skill. And that, he says, is why he stopped using profanity.
