> Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 12:44:26 -0400
> From: John Cowan <cowan@...>
> "Yankee" and "OK" stir up tremendous enthusiasm
> among etymology cranks. The latter is an acronym derived from a
> deliberate misspelling of "all correct" as "oll korrect", one example
> of a fashion popular in the U.S. during the 1840s.
I remember one iteration of that on sci.lang, where someone eventually
came up with cites from 1840's US papers to show that it came from the
presidential campaign of James van Buren (I think), whose nickname was
Old Kinderhook. Has that been shown to be false?
Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)