So when "o.k." appeared in print, it was intended to be the shortening of "oll korrect," the humorous misspelling of "all correct." According to Allan Metcalf, author of OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word, Boston Morning Post editor Charles Gordon Greene, who often wrote witticisms and took shots Bleary-eyed readers scanning page two of the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839, may have barely noticed the linguistic oddity buried in the blizzard of ink in the second column. At the end of a short, throwaway item taking sarcastic jabs at a Providence newspaper stood the abbreviation “o.k.” next to the words “all correct.” Much like the modern-day world filled with text-friendly shortcuts such as LOL and OMG, an abbreviation craze swept nineteenth-century America, although with a twist. In an attempt at humor, young, educated elites deliberately misspelled words and abbreviated them for slang. For example, “KG” stood for “know go,” the...