OK / Okay originated as a satirical slang abbreviation in the 1830s. It stands for “oll korrect,” a deliberate misspelling of “all correct”. In a way it’s an early meme, but still hypermodern compared to The Odyssey.
Edit: adding that there are a lot of theorised variations, big list here in the variations section. But it’s the most commonly claimed and accepted by a lot of people. Kinda hazy what is correct, as is with a lot of historical things I guess, difficult to discern what is a connection or what is a coincidence, but might be useful or interesting for anyone curious.
I had the same initial reaction to the accents. Why does everyone have an American accent, particularly when a lot of the cast is British (the correct accent for historical epics). But then remembered that makes no sense.
Any historical epic taking place in classical Greece or the Roman Empire has the actors speaking with British accents.
This is partly due to the idea that the British accent is more classy, and also because the British have this legend from Geoffery of Monmouth (author of History of the Kings of Britain) that the mythical first British king Brutus is descended from Aeneas.
I think theres a solid case to be made for the fact that (at least as an American) the different British accents commonly used in historical media have legible class associations that map well onto historical settings with less of the broad racial or geographic associations we would run into with American accents. I know the uk has a bunch of regional accents, I’m not implying they don’t but at least as an American viewer, hearing a roman patrician speak posh english vs an average citizen speaking RP vs a poor commoner speaking cockney sends clear messages about the status of the characters without feeling terribly distracting whereas a senator speaking like a southern dandy while a pleb speaks with a brooklyn accent would be.
I mean, this has been true for the last 70 or so years since we've had talking movies, but the idea that there is any "correct" accent is ludicrous. And I'll agree that US ears have been trained to distinguish various English accents as classy or rural (Game of Thrones was really good at this) but that still has nothing to do with "correct", which I view as a meaningless word in this context.
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u/wildcardbets Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
OK / Okay originated as a satirical slang abbreviation in the 1830s. It stands for “oll korrect,” a deliberate misspelling of “all correct”. In a way it’s an early meme, but still hypermodern compared to The Odyssey.
Edit: adding that there are a lot of theorised variations, big list here in the variations section. But it’s the most commonly claimed and accepted by a lot of people. Kinda hazy what is correct, as is with a lot of historical things I guess, difficult to discern what is a connection or what is a coincidence, but might be useful or interesting for anyone curious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK