Small Potatoes

[00:00] Next topic, we've got an undegoogle-ble.
[00:04] We do an undegoogle-ble. That was the play of it.
[00:13] I'm super excited. You told us we had to.
[00:17] You said we signed up for it. In the end, it's going to be better
[00:23] and more true than Google can give you.
[00:27] Coalson, what is it that we're going to lighten you with this week?
[00:31] I've actually been holding on to this one for a while, but what brought it up for me was
[00:35] that we recently cut EK
[00:39] from the team, and we were
[00:43] originally trying to figure out things that
[00:47] rhymed with EK.
[00:51] We're all okay with EK, I think, was one of our
[00:55] chants. I was thinking about,
[00:59] I don't know where the phrase or where the term okay comes from.
[01:03] It's used quite a bit. I feel like I use it every day in my life.
[01:07] When I used to pay for
[01:11] every text, people would send me K
[01:15] in response to stuff, and I'd be like, stop sending me K.
[01:19] I don't know where okay comes from, and I want to talk to my smart friends
[01:23] and have you guys let me know. I can get you partway there.
[01:27] Then things get weird fast.
[01:31] You know a little bit about okay. Okay is old kinder hook. It's like an old
[01:35] political slogan from one of the J
[01:39] presidents, Johnson, Jackson, something.
[01:47] Yeah, it's old kinder hook is where the okay came from.
[01:51] It's like a short of that. So old kinder hook was one of
[01:55] the J's nicknames? As far as I can get you, now it gets weird.
[02:02] Okay, that's a good start.
[02:06] Old kinder hook. And then it's now come to
[02:10] mean like sure, or
[02:14] I agree. Everything's affirmative. Well, yeah, it just sort of means
[02:18] yeah, you can put your, I don't know, I think it was supposed to mean
[02:22] at the time like reliability, right? Okay. But I don't know
[02:26] where old kinder hook came from is our issue.
[02:30] That sounds German. Is that a German like? Well, kinder is
[02:34] definitely kid, right? Right. Like kindergarten.
[02:38] So it's like a child hook. I don't like it.
[02:42] It was very reliable to get your child out of trouble.
[02:46] You just hook them out of the way.
[02:50] I'm thinking like when they're on stage and they like to get the oversized hook to
[02:54] I was thinking like a massive fish hook. Just go
[02:58] catch them like a tuna.
[03:05] That's right. My kids running off better go get them with the kinder hook.
[03:09] Okay.
[03:13] So how does old kinder hook turn into
[03:17] essentially saying yes or Roger or
[03:21] Well, old kinder hook is clearly like doesn't exactly roll off the top.
[03:25] Well, right. But so was it like a nickname for somebody
[03:31] or it was definitely a nickname and it wasn't like it
[03:35] definitely wasn't Jackson. I'm pretty sure that means it wasn't Johnson either.
[03:39] So now that I think about it can't be a J president.
[03:43] Okay. But it was in that era. Millard Fillmore. Yeah, it's back. Yeah, it's definitely. We're talking like
[03:47] 18 Van Buren or something. We're talking like 1850. Yeah, like Van Buren.
[03:51] Okay. Maybe a Tyler or a Taylor. Somewhere in there.
[03:55] Yeah, maybe T not a J. But like 1840s, 1850s.
[03:59] Old kinder hook.
[04:04] It just meant yeah, reliable and then
[04:08] yeah, I don't know. That's weird.
[04:15] The parlance. Yeah. So this is so you're saying this is strictly American.
[04:19] It's not it's not coming from some other
[04:23] we didn't bring this in from I don't know the Germans or the
[04:29] Scottish or something. This is I think okay as an
[04:33] abbreviation for her for this.
[04:37] Again, I kinder hook could easily be
[04:41] German. But I'm saying this. It's got a strong German
[04:45] root, right? Sure. But it's uniquely American
[04:49] shortening. Okay. It's definitely like western hemisphere
[04:53] like that. Yes. Okay. Yeah.
[04:57] And you're saying like 1800s. I'm saying 1840s,
[05:01] 1850s. It's like right in there. Okay.
[05:05] Joey, have you ever heard anything about where okay came
[05:09] from? No, I actually have not.
[05:13] I know you got your Oscar kilo
[05:17] but that's not helpful. I don't know what
[05:21] Oscar kilo is. It's just the military
[05:25] pronunciation. Oh, I see. Sure. When you're speaking over radio
[05:29] you can't hear everything well. So you use the right, you know, like Oscar Mike
[05:33] is on the move. It's just military abbreviation.
[05:37] Okay. Oscar kilo. So is this possibly a military
[05:41] thing? No. Okay. Again, they would have just had to say Oscar
[05:47] kilo. It's a political thing. Right. Okay. Now, I'm sure that the
[05:51] military may have appropriated in ways afterwards. Right. Well, they would
[05:55] have been essentially they're expanding a shortening if they're saying Oscar kilo
[05:59] because it's, yeah, that doesn't help. Okay.
[06:03] Stop not helping, Joey. Come on. Not bad. Not bad.
[06:07] Go learn something in the past and come back to you.
[06:11] Also, why do we sometimes, so we also spell
[06:15] it phonetically where we put O-K-A-Y
[06:19] if it isn't shorting for O and K.
[06:23] Sometimes there's the periods but now it's, sometimes we spell it out.
[06:27] That's all. Is that just from usage? Just been,
[06:31] it's just so used. Yeah. That's just, that's just like
[06:35] transmogrification or anything. Yeah. My guess is that's like
[06:39] it got entered into the dictionary at some point under that spelling.
[06:43] Like it was a word that was used and so they had to come up with
[06:47] a spelling for it. Because O period K period
[06:51] which is short for old kinder hook. Like no one knows what that means.
[06:55] It's like 1880, right? Like it took on a life of its own so then it took
[06:59] on a spelling of its own. All right. Well, I suppose
[07:05] if old kinder hook is a nickname
[07:11] of a reliable president that somehow gets morphed
[07:15] into a shortening that also somehow becomes
[07:19] everything's okay. Everything's fine.
[07:23] I like it. I'm in on this 1840s. Let's go. Anybody else got a different idea?
[07:28] No, that's like definitely what it is, but I don't know. Okay.
[07:32] I just don't know what old kinder hook means. Okay. It's got to be some
[07:36] regional thing, right?
[07:40] And if we knew who it was, we'd have a better shot, right? So if it's
[07:46] where are Tyler, Taylor, and Van Buren from?
[07:51] All right. I'm going to Google this. You guys,
[07:55] like I said, I've said this has been passed under Google Bulls. I don't know why the internet even exists.
[07:59] So,
[08:03] in 1840,
[08:07] President Martin Van Buren.
[08:11] I do know sort of where presidents
[08:15] were. Right. So Van Buren definitely
[08:19] like he was definitely Northerner
[08:23] somewhere in New England. It says it's derived from his
[08:29] birthplace. That doesn't make any sense.
[08:33] Oh, he was from Kinderhook, New York.
[08:37] And so what I'm reading is that it's actually
[08:41] oral correct, which is all correct
[08:45] was the original thing, and somehow that got
[08:49] conflated with old Kinderhook.
[08:53] All correct is just a misspelling of all correct.
[08:57] Well, it's like a British. I have no idea.
[09:02] Let's see what we get. Let's take a wiki here.
[09:08] Okay. Principally means adequate or acceptable.
[09:12] So it can also mean mediocre. So I guess I've overstated
[09:16] it as a positive
[09:20] term. So they were just calling. They were basically saying
[09:24] Van Buren's just okay. I don't think that's the case
[09:28] probably. But looking back on history, this is about right.
[09:32] Yeah, exactly. Okay, the term appears to have achieved national
[09:36] prominence in 1840 when supporters of the Democratic Political
[09:40] Party claimed during the 1840 United States
[09:44] presidential election that it stood for old Kinderhook, a name for the Democratic
[09:48] President and candidate for election, Martin Van Buren.
[09:52] Vote for okay was snappier than using his Dutch name.
[09:56] Once wig opponents attributed okay
[10:00] in the sense of all correct to Andrew Jackson's bad spelling.
[10:04] The countrywide publicity surrounding the election appears to have been a critical
[10:08] event in okay's history, widely and suddenly popularizing
[10:12] it across the United States. Okay, well that's
[10:16] pretty cool. So that's where the Jay came from. I knew it had something to do with the Jay
[10:20] President. Gotcha.
[10:24] It was Saturday, March 23rd,
[10:28] 1839 on the second page of the Boston Morning Post
[10:32] and an editorial making use of joking abbreviations
[10:36] common in the papers of that town at the time
[10:40] was the passing introduction of okay or all correct.
[10:44] But that's the same time period though. You can see how
[10:48] all of that would come together. So Coalson along with that
[10:52] Wikipedia says in the late 1830s
[10:56] there was a Boston abbreviation fad. It became
[11:00] quite the thing to do. Things like
[11:04] NG was no-go which saved you two characters. Three if you could save
[11:08] you two characters. GT means
[11:12] gone to Texas obviously. SP, small
[11:16] potatoes. And LOL, land of love, back end
[11:20] 1839. It's funny that we've just basically gone back
[11:24] to that. We've returned to our 1800s
[11:28] abbreviation roots. Well here's how difficult the
[11:32] etymology on this is. So they came up with a new theory
[11:36] in 1941. There's 1962 articles
[11:40] making new arguments. This is
[11:44] still like somewhat under
[11:48] is still being challenged on some level. But I think the big thing is
[11:52] it happened like there's a presidential election and
[11:56] people were fighting over this weird phrase. That's kind of a bizarre thing.
[12:00] Yeah, alternative explanations
[12:04] are that it was based on the manufacture of a popular army biscuit
[12:08] or in Kindle or a Choctaw chief named Old Keocook.
[12:12] And there's a bunch
[12:18] of alternative etymologies going
[12:22] back to West Africa and those
[12:26] dialects. Yeah, no, there's a lot there. But as a popular
[12:30] rising moment it was clearly the presidential election. That was
[12:34] informative. That's how it entered the public consciousness. Great, well done, sir.
[12:38] Yeah, but what's interesting is that whichever
[12:42] party you were in, you could say okay and it had a completely different
[12:46] meaning, but would still be conversant, which is weird.
[12:50] It's not how we roll these days. I don't know how we roll these days.
[12:54] We just have committed to speaking two entirely different languages. That's how we roll these days.
[12:58] Lawrence Horn, the professor of linguistics
[13:02] and philosophy at Yale, agrees with you and says that
[13:06] Van Buren and his supporters did not create the term but very much
[13:10] kept it alive. Well, he's from Yale so
[13:14] now I no longer agree with what I said before.
[13:18] Take it all back.
[13:23] Well done, team. You're right. Why do we even need the internet?
[13:30] That's why America, or not even America, we've got
[13:34] listeners all over the world. That's why people come to us. You just need to know
[13:38] 1840s. There was a J president in there somewhere. That's all you need to know.
[13:42] I'd like to see the citations in a paper.
[13:46] Our citations are mostly hams.
[13:50] Ham 6, February 17, 2019.
[13:54] If we get sourced to the scholarly
[13:59] paper, I think that means profit, right?
[14:03] That means question mark on that paper.
[14:07] Jason, when are the
[14:11] unbeatables going to get cited in the scholarly paper? I'll try to work it into the next one I write.
[14:15] Thank you, sir. Don't force it. Try to make it look natural.
[14:19] Yeah, of course. We'll all give our input to
[14:23] make it look natural and organic. We'll work on this for
[14:27] a year to make it look. No, why don't you just use the phrase
[14:33] okay in your next scholarly paper and then source us as the
[14:37] ...
[14:41] Mostly because you can't use okay in a scholarly paper.
[14:45] All correct. Old correct.
[14:49] Man, I freaking nailed it.
[14:53] Yeah, well done, Harper.
[14:57] That was well done, Harper.
[15:01] I can get you to weird places where nothing is correct.
[15:05] Where everything's okay. Everything's okay.
[15:09] There's no wrong answers on the unbeatables, man.
[15:13] There's different shades of wrong.
[15:17] Just a lot of gray.
[15:21] More and more every day. Lots of child hooks.
[15:27] Catching children like so
[15:31] much child death.