"SOCCER" is like "OKAY"

OKAY

I’m a fan of etymology and semantics and, really, everything to do with language; still, somehow I never gave much thought to the term okay (or o.k., otherwise OK) — despite it so loudly begging to be investigated.

If I had to guess I would have assumed okay was teased out of alright or possibly some other affirmative, perhaps all clear or aye-aye or somesuch, maybe as a shorthand or a mishearing that just stuck with us somehow… Exactly wrong, but not the worst guess.

Apparently the term’s derivation was debated exhaustively and for quite some time. Some experts were confident the word originated with the Scottish expression och aye, meaning “oh yes”. Makes sense. Others explained that the Fins have a word, oikea (meaning “right” or “correct”), from which the English term most sensibly arises. Seems perfectly obvious. However, the Greeks, on the other hand, were pretty sure OK, like so many English terms, came from them, in this case the phrase Ὅλα Καλά (Olla Kalla), translating to “all good” or “everything’s fine”. All sensible.

But we’re also told the French liked to argue for an alternative source: OK, they tell us, came from the pronunciation of the Haiti port town of Aux Cayes (and OK being the abbreviation the English stamped onto kegs and crates with this as their destination or origin.) Others insisted OK’s origins were with German. One telling has it as the initials of the military rank Oberst Kommandant and the habit of this leadership rank signing off all correspondences with these initials. But in 1941 Newsweek insisted to their readers that popular use came out of the publishing business, where O.K. (from the German Ohne Korrectur [sic], meaning “Without Changes”) denotes that a manuscript is all set and ready to go to print.

Some, like Pete Seeger, had another plausible alternative: that Andrew Jackson adopted and introduced the term into English after all his time spent with Pushamataha, Brigadier General of the US Army and Chief of the Choctaw Nation. Choctaw, afterall, has an interjection okeh (meaning something approximating “so it is”). Another proposal for the origin of the term was that it arose out of the US Civil War and a better-than-average brand of hardtack biscuits from the vendor Orrin-Kendall. Others had OK as a misinterpretation of OR, meaning “Order Received” (and originating on a bill of sale from 1790 — a bill of sale for a human being…)

Though the context is now lost to time, a newspaper editor in New Hampshire was once emphatic, publishing that “‘O.K.’ means Oysters Kome.” (This might hint at another related craze for replacing Cs with Ks and just randomly throwing them in where they don’t belong in print beginning in the early 19th century United States…) Others asserted “o.k.” arrived from electric telegraphy, possibly with “open key”, which was the state the messaging device is said to be in when its button is not being depressed and no current is flowing through the signal line. As it turns out, though off, the telegraphy guess does send us down the right track.

Now, if you thought there was something novel about the cellphone-era craze of abbreviating everything (IMO, BTW, TLDR, TTYL, ICYMI…) you’d be wrong. Two hundred years ago there was a fashion for abbreviating all sorts of common phrases. (Maybe because at the same time literacy exploded simultaneous with the mechanized printing press, causing a flood of cheap, ubiquitous print and a new desire for shorthand? I don’t know. That’s something else to look into…) In that context, young Boston intellectuals were busily inventing their own code of deliberately misspelled and abbreviated phrases. They took common phrases, things like “enough said”, and transmuted them, in this case into “knuff ced”, which they would then shorten to the first bastardized initials of the word pair: “KC”. “No use”? “KY” (know yuse). Kute. Wryt? 

Given the affirmative in common usage at that time, indicating everything was in order, was “all correct” (all but extinct at present, or so it seems from where I sit), this same cohort invented “oll korrect” and shortened that to “OK”. And that’s it. This seems to be the earliest deliberate and relatively popular, if hyper-local, usage. But that’s only the origin, not what made it truly ubiquitous.

On Saturday, March 23, 1839, Boston Morning Post put “o.k.” in print for the first time, spreading it to the wider world. It arrived in the pages of the Post because their editor was having a public, Twitter-style feud with the editor of the Providence Journal. He offered:

From the sidelines, the amused editor of the North-Carolina Gazette got in on the fun:

From the Boston Times.

“OK.”

I’ve seen them on the Atlas’s page,

   And also in the Post,

When both were boiling o’er with rage,

   To see which fibbed the most. 

The Major has kome off the best ;

   The Kurnel is surprised !

The one it seems meant  Oll Korrect, 

   The other, Oll kapsized !

The Mississippi Free Trader spelled out this cultural innovation for her readers: “Definitions- In the new initial language ‘K.O.’ means kick over, and ‘O.K.’ means oll korrect”

The Daily Picayune noted the linguistic happening but also drew a line in the sand: “‘C.K.’ —O.K., everybody knows, may be oll korrect, but when it comes to making C.K. stand for Couth Karolina, we give up.”

So the word, on this word, was out and drifting far from the campuses and parlors of Massachusetts. But, importantly, around this same time, in 1844, a new and transformative communication technology hit the scene: the electric telegraph. And with its arrival, of course, new standards of practice were proposed and crystalized. “OK” (all correct) quickly asserted itself as the standard Morse Code abbreviation to signify receipt of a clearly decoded message. (At the time: . .  - . -  Today:  - - -  - . -) And so this novelty quickly took off and took over, spreading everywhere a telegraph line stretched (which was any place a railroad went [which, by the latter decades of that century, was almost anywhere a population of any size had coagulated.])

All of this origin story was carefully sleuthed and spelled out by the “playful prospector of the American tongue”, expert in latrinalia and obscenity, Allen Walker Read - 1906-2002. Aside from solving the puzzle of “OK”, Read, the Rhodes scholar and Columbia University professor, published a famous work titled Classic American Graffiti and carried out the definitive scholarly study of the term “fuck”... For more on this wacky term (okay) and its curious origins go get: Read (1964) The Folklore of “O.K.” Alternatively, the 2010 book OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word from Allan Metcalf.

Okay, now what does all that have to do with soccer? Well, soccer arrived right around the same time and from a remarkably similar source, only not in the location you (or at least I) might assume.

SOCCER

I always thought soccer was the North American term for what the rest of the planet calls football. I also fabricated my own plausible derivation. I assumed Americans confused things somehow or invented their own term, just to be different. Or maybe they birthed their own very different game, christening it “football” first, only to later adopt the European sport — and then feeling they needed an alternative label, not wanting to confuse anyone or rebrand an existing league, or something, they manufactured for the world this very weird word. Nope. Not at all. Just about the opposite, in fact.

Just like “OK”, “soccer” came to us as a kind of slang from college kids, and around the same time, too; but not from America. Soccer was effectively the original English name for the sport I think of as soccer.

In the first half of the 19th century, two versions of the same game “football” coexisted in England. The modern game of soccer was distilled out from the other when the Football Association formed to codify its rules. Actually, as the story goes, it was a Monday evening in October of 1863, and the leadership of a dozen football and other sporting clubs met at the Freemasons' Tavern in London, as one does, to establish "a definite code of rules for the regulation of the game.” In 1871, the Rugby Football Union formed and did the same. From then on the two sports, now clearly distinct, officially became known as “Rugby Football” and “Association Football”.

And that’s where London’s young intellectuals took over. As was popular for Oxford students to do at the time, words were commonly abbreviated and given the suffix -er. So “football” was popularly termed “footer” prior to its fragmentation into a pair of very different games. Following their permanent cleavage, “Rugby Football” was then shortened to “rugg-er” and “Association Football” was abbreviated to ”assoc-er”. This evolved into the slightly cleaner and better spelled “soccer”.

All of the above is spelled out in a wonderful paper titled “It’s Football not Soccer”, by Stefan Szymanski, out of the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Michigan. The author offers up all kinds of other interesting details about the origins of “foot-ball” games and related terms, too: 

According to the Oxford English dictionary the first recorded use of the word “football” in English was in 1486. A game played on Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) in London is described by William Fitzstephen in 1175 (in latin), and it is widely conjectured that this was a game of football. Shrove Tuesday football was popular practice across England6 from the middle ages until the end of the nineteenth century and latin chronicles refer to the activity of playing at ball with the feet (ad pilam cum pede). Laws of various Kings ban the playing of ball games – Edward II (1314), Edward III (1349), Richard II (1389), Henry IV (1401) and Edward IV (1477) – these ordinances aimed at diverting young men toward the practice of archery, more helpful to the military ambitions of the monarch.

The antiquarian Joseph Strutt, writing in 1801, identifies the game of “foot-­‐ball” and says “It was formerly much in vogue among the common people of England, though of late years it seems to have fallen into disrepute, and is but little practiced” (p168). About this time it appears that the game became popular with the aristocratic boys of England’s leading schools-­‐ Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby and so on. Each school developed its own version of the game. The desire to play games against boys from rival schools, especially while attending University (meaning Cambridge or Oxford at that time) required some standardization. The first written rules of the game were penned in Cambridge in 1848. The Football Association was founded in London in 1863 to promote the game and the rules adopted were based on Cambridge rules.

…

Between 1850 and 1900 the game of football fragmented into a number different versions played in various parts of the anglo-­saxon world. Rugby football divided into two codes in 1895, Rugby Union and Rugby League, primarily on the issue of payment— “League” became professional and “Union” remained amateur for an entire century. Both rugby codes are played with an oval‐shaped ball and allow the use of feet and hands. Gaelic football, a game developed in Ireland and codified in 1887 is played with feet and hands using a round ball, while Australian Rules football, known from at least 1858, is played with an oval shaped ball on an oval shaped field also using both feet and hands. Finally, the game called “football” in the US (colloquially “gridiron” and “American football” in Britain and elsewhere) evolved out of collegiate athletics in the late 19th century.

Szymanski also shows us that what many often think of as the American term, soccer, was widely used in the UK up until the 1980s. But since then, he offers, “The penetration of the game into American culture has led to backlash against the use of the word in Britain, where it was once considered an innocuous alternative to the word ‘football.’” He pairs this finding with a rather conclusive graph showing the term’s precipitous decline in popular print media in the UK from forty years ago to the present.

So there you have it. Like so much of our language, okay and soccer arrived and took off not as an intentional scholarly exercise — some kind of lexical surgery born from a conference on modern English usage and for the purpose of enriching or repairing the language or making communication more efficient — but instead as random, quirky trends that accidentally went mainstream. (Like, OMG! WTF?! Based.) And, as ever, everything I assumed turns out to be exactly wrong. Love it!