Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – Oi and Ok

Oi

Oi – Take the word ‘ahoy’, and drop the ‘a’ from repeated use. Then move the word ‘hoy’ to a Cockney accent and drop the ‘h’ sound. Change the ‘y’ to an ‘i’ for funsies, and you end up with oi!: used to get someone’s attention, or to express annoyance, an objection, or surprise. As in “Oi! There ain’t no vinegar for me chips!”

That’s Oxford’s first definition. But I want to talk about the second definition: An aggressive hard rock/punk rock movement popular in the late 70s and early 80s.

In 1980, Garry Bushell first wrote about the new movement for Sounds Magazine, pulling the term from Stinky Turner of the Cockney Rejects, who used to introduce his songs by yelling “Oi!”, which was probably subsumed from the chants football fans shouted in the stadium. Bushnell saw The 4-Skins, The Business, and Anti-Establishment (and retroactively Sham 69 and Cock Sparrer) as belonging to a separate sub-genre with a different audience that took as much influence from the Ramones and the Sex Pistols as they did 60s mod rock groups like Small Faces and The Who, and football pub songs.

But while influences of mid-tempo hard rock and football are unmistakable, it doesn’t do a good job explaining why Oi is different from other forms of punk rock. Because a number of punk bands include these influences and don’t call themselves Oi. And a number of Oi bands don’t appear to take cues from hard rock or football. If that’s the case, what’s the point of the name? What makes these bands different? I’ve been on the hunt the past week and the only thing I can say for certain is that even punk enthusiasts aren’t sure. If I was to hazard a guess, though, Oi isn’t so much a music genre so much as it is a music culture.

All punk bands are, to some extent, a reaction to the establishment, whether they call for anarchy or reformation. Oi in particular is defined by an appeal to working class pride, workers’ rights, localism, and a dissatisfaction with both big business and big government. This isn’t to say that other punk genres aren’t driven by these ideas, but there’s no fashion forward punk chic aesthetic here. Oi is bare, aggressive, and pragmatic as opposed to theoretical. Its original audience tended to appeal to skinheads who wore their work uniforms of Doc Martens boots, jeans, button down shirts, and no-nonsense buzzed down haircuts into concerts.

Oi is what happens when a teen punk graduates from high school and gets a dead end job. And as workers punched their clocks and headed to the pub to hear Peter and the Test Tube Babies yell about how they “Wanna Rob a Bank”, the media connected a few dots between fear of the working class and fascism, saw a new youth skinhead movement that was an easy target for a moral panic, worked their way back to Oi, and declared Oi a fascist music genre. This created a polarizing effect. Some number of real fascists picked up the threads the media tossed and glommed onto the idea of being a skinhead and listening to Oi. Meanwhile, a much larger faction of skinheads and Oi enthusiasts made a very concerted stance to be aggressively anti-fascist.

No matter how many oaths the Oi community swears, however, it’s possible there may always be accusations of fascism from those looking in from the outside. Even Oxford’s English Dictionary appears to have jumped on the bandwagon with this misleading sentence…

“Although initially an offshoot of the punk phenomenon, and similarly identified as a movement of urban working-class youth, Oi came frequently to be associated with extreme right-wing political movements in the U.K. and Europe.”

…which infers that while Oi once had working class roots, but now is a form of extremist nazi propaganda. This despite the fact that one would be hard pressed to find any openly fascist Oi band, while there are a considerable number of Oi bands that are very vocal in their opposition to fascism.

Considering all the drama surrounding Oi, it’s understandable why musicians leaned into the mohawk, and recording labels invented the term Street Punk to divorce themselves from Oi, despite there being very few musical or social differences between the two genres. Nobody wants to be called a fascist. And it’s also understandable why some punks rallied around the word Oi and refused to drop the term or the culture. Because nobody wants to be called a fascist. It’s a pride thing. And of all the music genres out there, punk somehow embodies both an insatiable pride, as well as an utter selfless lack of pride at the same time.

Ok

Ok is fine. Sometimes it’s great or acceptable, but mostly it’s fine.

Writing the rest of this article is a trap. There’s a widely known, little known story about where the expression came from. It’s such an underwhelming story, that it pops up in the movie Silver Linings Playbook when the main character offers a fun fact about the U.S. presidents, which kills the kindled conversation. Here’s a piece of the script:

RONNIE: Pat was a history sub at the high school, Tiffany. Ask him about any president, he knows ’em all.

PAT: Here’s a fun fact. You know where the term “OK” comes from?

VERONICA: No. No, I don’t.

RONNIE: Where?

PAT: Well, Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States of America, is from Kinderhook, New York…

VERONICA: Oh.

PAT: …and he was part of a club, a men’s club, called Old Kinderhook. And if you were cool, you were in the club, they’d say, “That guy’s OK.” ‘Cause he was in the Old Kinderhooks.

RONNIE: Really?

PAT: Yeah. Pretty cool, right?

RONNIE: That’s interesting.

The exchange is scripted beautifully. Ronnie is far too eager. He repeats everyone’s names. He asks ‘where?’ unnecessarily in an attempt to feed excitement into something that isn’t. And he caps it off with ‘really?’ as if this particularly ignorable fact was a difficult to swallow whopper, and follows it all with a desperate ‘that’s interesting’, a statement you never make when something is actually interesting. Meanwhile, Victoria’s ‘oh.’ tells us that she immediately recognizes how this factoid is bound to wrap up and that she already checked out. She doesn’t need the details. It’s enough knowing that there’s something regional in Kinderhook, New York going on to know she won’t get anything of value out of the story.

It’s a pedantic story, and it’s topped by another pedantism: the expression was used before the ‘Old Kinderhooks’ picked it up. They called themselves ‘Old Kinderhooks’ because they were OK, and not the other way around. Some lexographers like to repeat the story that it may instead be an abbreviation for all correct, or ‘oll korect’ because intentional misspelling was how newspapers showed you they were cool back in the 1830s. Or not. It’s true that newspapers loved making acronyms out of misspellings, and OW or ‘oll wright’ was in use. But even Allen Walker Read, the man responsible for Ok’s most common origin story in his American Journal of Speech article, thinks there’s a good chance the newspapers ‘discovered’ an abbreviation for a word already in use.

Alternatively, the Choctaw word for ‘it is so’ is ‘oke’. The West African word ‘waw-ney’, loosely translates to ‘yes indeed’. The Scottish ‘och aye’ (oh yes) and the Greek óla kalá (all good) both get mentioned. Which makes for a good reminder that sometimes lexography is guesswork, word origins are just stories, and what we repeat to each other sometimes says more about the storyteller than about the events of the story.

But while no one is certain where ‘ok’ came from, we can see where’s it’s been. It’s one of the most common words in the world, across every language. Something about the dominance of English, the need for a word that’s a fun alternative for ‘good’, and the perfect rise and fall pitch with two strong vowels and a kick in the middle. It’s also a rarity in that it’s pronounced by sounding out the letters. Considering how so difficult it can be to pronounce English words based on they way they’re spelled, this breach of pronunciation protocol stands out and makes the word very easy to repeat.

It doesn’t hurt that the word’s function is very broad, ranging from mediocre, to operational, to correct, to yes, to affirmative, to fantastic. This broad range of use means that no matter what niche a language needs the word ‘ok’ to fill, it can do it, and the speaker won’t be corrected for using the word ‘wrong’. But if you use the word like a native English speaker, you get even more value from a simple word that fills a specific niche many languages do not fill. Ok is a a way to say yes without commitment. It’s a way to agree without judgement. If someone tells me that they’re going to the store and I say, “Ok”, I told them nothing about how I feel on the subject. Even a response of ‘I understand’ brings a certain intentional neutral air with it. Ok says that the message was received, and nothing more.

Maybe that’s the word’s legacy. We created a word that is somehow both exciting and practical, with a wide variety of uses. But it’s also a word that lets us be non-committal and obtuse. Ok is a friendly word that sells you something while offering nothing in exchange. It is quintessentially American.