Published: July 29, 2008 11:19 pm         

The never-ending cycle of slang

ON SECOND THOUGHT

By Carol Ferguson



Does slang go in cycles?

I had always thought these fad expressions came into use — or over-use as the case may be — and then faded and disappeared.

For example, no one today says “23 skidoo.” I know it dates from the Roaring Twenties, but I had to look up the exact meaning, which is “to leave quickly or get out while the getting’s good.”

A slang phrase from my childhood years, however, seems to be quite popular again with the present generation. A few weeks ago when I was paying for a book store purchase, an extremely young salesperson handed me my change and said, to my surprise, “Okey-dokey.”

Shades of the 1930s! We oldsters might come out with this phrase, but I hadn’t heard anyone under 20 use “okey-dokey” in recent years.

Not long after that incident, Shelley Morgan, the young woman who is manager of classified advertising here at the Herald-Banner, breezed through the newsroom saying “Okey-dokey” in response to someone’s request.

What is going on here?

I asked her about it later at lunch break, and she told me her grandmother always used the phrase. Then a woman who was restocking the vending machines in the break room at the time joined in the conversation. She said her children heard it on the PBS cartoon show, “Dragon Tales.”

As the song says, “”Everything old is new again.”

Researching “okey-dokey” on the Internet, I read that it is a “playful version of OK,” as we might have guessed. It made its print debut in the 1930s.

Another Internet site offered readers the chance to weigh in on the subject. Most people agreed that “okey-dokey” means “OK,” but one far-out soul said, “It means OK, fine or great. It’s Latin.”

Latin? Oh, sure.

Can’t you just imagine Julius Caesar writing, “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, okey-dokey?”

I did discover that OK (or okay) goes back several hundred years. Supporters of the American Democratic political party claimed during the 1840 presidential election that it stood for “Old Kinderhook,” Kinderhook being a nickname for Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren, a native of Kinderhook, N.Y. “Vote for OK” was considered a snappier slogan than his Dutch name.

Others supposedly attributed OK, in the sense of “oll korrect,” to Andrew Jackson’s bad spelling.

The site says both explanations are improbable, and it also questions suggestions that OK came from either the Choctaw word “okey” or the Mandingo phrase “o ke.”

An additional site suggested OK is from the French, “au quai,” meaning “at dock.”

Whatever its origin, OK is in use throughout the world today.

Another old slang phrase is “Lickety-split,” which popped up during a recent radio interview on an early morning news show.

Again the Internet came to my aid with the information that the first occasion of the phrase in print was in 1843. It was quoted in Bartlett’s 1859 “Dictionary of Americanisms” as meaning “very fast, headlong.”

“Lickety click,” “lickety cut” and “lickety switch” were similar terms which all mean the same thing.

One source said the word “lickety” is onomatopoetic (words imitating the sounds they refer to), as with the ticking of a clock or the clickety-click of a train.

Another site said “lickety-split” had possible Scottish influences, such as “going at quite a lick,” The second word of the term — “split”— was added as an intensifier.

The one thing all these phrases have in common is that no one is certain how they arose.

Good grief! Well, there’s another odd expression closely associated in recent years with Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown. Just what is good about grief, though?

My old standby, the Internet, said “good grief” is probably a minced oath, which is a softened form of another exclamation that some might think was blasphemous — in this case “Good God!” For this phrase, then, the only relevant part of the word “grief” is the first letter “G.”

I’ll buy that. How about you?

Okey-dokey?



Ferguson is a feature writer for the Herald-Banner.