Text speek bth12/2/2023 ![]() Metcalf builds on Read's pioneering work in the soon-to-be-published OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word.)Įven before KTJ of UTK (Katie Jay of Utica, or Uticay) came on the scene in the United States, England had LNG of Q (Ellen Gee of Kew) and MLE K of UL (Emily Kay of Ewell), who starred in two tragicomic verses published in 1828 in the London-based New Monthly Magazine. in the 1830s - OK originally stood for "all correct" intentionally misspelled as "oll korrect." (Allan A. That 1963 article was one of a series in which Read proved conclusively that OK had emerged out of a kind of "abbreviation play" that was popular in the U.S. An earlier version, entitled "To Miss Catherine Jay of Utica," dates back to 1832, as noted by Allen Walker Read in his 1963 article in American Speech, "The First Stage in the History of 'O.K.'" Entitled "An Essay to Miss Catharine Jay," it had been floating around in that exact form at least since 1847 in American publications (as here). (In my puzzling youth, I treasured Bombaugh's Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature, reprinted by Dover and edited by Martin Gardner.) Bombaugh didn't write the poem himself, however. Bombaugh's Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature - you can read it here. The poem in the British Library exhibit is culled from Charles C. I've investigated this proto-text-speak and have found similar versified examples going all the way back to 1828. ![]() A new exhibit at the British Library on the evolution of English will feature some linguistic play that presages the age of "text-speak." As reported by The Guardian, the exhibit will display a comic poem printed in 1867 with lines like "I wrote 2 U B 4" ("I wrote to you before"). ![]()
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