OK by Metcalf Allan;

Author:Metcalf, Allan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2011-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Bookkeeping

Another glimpse of the business use of OK appears in Business Bookkeeping, published in 1894. Regarding branch store accounts, Business Bookkeeping instructs:

After checking the bills for such goods, to see that they are O. K. (all correct), the branch store turns the bills over to the main store, first debiting “Merchandise” and crediting “Main Store.”

OK Blanks

Meanwhile, to keep track of everything, by the early twentieth century railroads had developed OK blanks. Theodore Dreiser made OK blanks a focus of his autobiographical 1919 story “The Mighty Rourke,” telling of his experience years earlier working for the Irish foreman Rourke on the railroad:

When I first met him he was laying the foundation for a small dynamo in the engine-room of the repair shop at Spike.…

[He] fished out of the pocket of his old gray coat a soiled and crumpled letter, which he carefully unfolded with his thick, clumsy fingers. Then he held it up and looked at it defiantly.

“I waant ye to go to Woodlawn,” he continued, “an’ look after some bolts that arre up there—there’s a keg av thim—an’ sign the bill fer thim, an’ ship thim down to me. An’ thin I waant ye to go down to the ahffice an’ take thim this o.k.” Here again he fished around and produced another crumpled slip, this time of a yellow color (how well I came to know them!), which I soon learned was an o.k. blank, a form which had to be filled in and signed for everything received, if no more than a stick of wood or a nail or a bolt. The company demanded these of all foremen, in order to keep its records straight. Its accounting department was useless without them. At the same time, Rourke kept talking of the “nonsinse av it,” and the “onraisonableness” of demanding o.k.s for everything. “Ye’d think some one was goin’ to sthale thim from thim,” he declared irritably and defiantly.

Dreiser took the OK blank to the “ahffice.”

There I found the chief clerk, a mere slip of a dancing master in a high collar and attractive office suit, who was also in a high state of dudgeon because Rourke, as he now explained, had failed to render an o.k. for this and other things, and did not seem to understand that he, the chief clerk, must have them to make up his reports. Sometimes o.k.s did not come in for a month or more, the goods lying around somewhere until Rourke could use them. He wanted to know what explanation Rourke had to offer, and when I suggested that the latter thought, apparently, that he could leave all consignments of goods in one station or another until such time as he needed them before he o.k.ed for them, he fairly foamed.

Rourke responds to the clerk’s request for an OK blank:

“An o.k. blank! An o.k. blank!” he echoed contentiously, but in a somewhat more conciliatory spirit. “He wants an o.k. blank, does he? Well, I expect ye might as well give thim to him, thin.

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