George Ade, Humorist, Playwright, Columnist – and Champion of a Now-Ubiquitous Word

George Ade (left), working at his home in Indiana.

A century ago, you wouldn’t have to be told who George Ade was. Regrettably, that’s not the case today. He was an acclaimed humorist, from Indiana and then Chicago, writing a column, “Stories of the Streets and of the Town,” at the turn of the 20th century in the Chicago Record, as well as the book Fables in Slang. He wrote plays too, including the first play about American football, and his money was behind the Ross-Ade Stadium, which is still in use at Purdue.

Wikipedia tells us “Ade’s fiction dealt consistently with the ‘little man,’ the common, undistinguished, average American, usually a farmer or lower middle class citizen.”

His particular distinction, along with a penchant for uppercase letters, was his liberal use of slang. It was a distinctive kind of slang, however, not the rough language of the streets but words suitable for all ages. As a result, perhaps more than anyone else, he was able to bring slang words into polite company.

One of them is OK.

I mean the expression OK. Its ubiquity nowadays comes in part from its versatility — adjective most often, but also verb, adverb, noun, and interjection. For that matter, you can call it a word, a phrase, an acronym, an abbreviation  — take your pick. Its importance is its role in approving projects and products, approving arrangements for meetings and activities, and expressing the American philosophy of pragmatism in two capital letters. (For details on this, see my 2011 book, OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word.)

But until I looked more closely at Ade, I hadn’t realized how important he was in the development of OK from a supposedly humorous abbreviation for “all correct” in a Boston newspaper of 1839, to its reinforcement in 1840 as part of the name of “OK Clubs” promoting the re-election of “Old Kinderhook,” President Martin Van Buren (he lost), to the first adoption of OK as a common shorthand in communications regarding telegraph, railroads, and documents.

Still, when the dust settled, after  OK  had established itself in the 1840s, it was by no means the ubiquitous expression we use now. It was on the one hand part of telegraph and railroad jargon, and the initials of approval put on documents at schools and government authorities, and on the other hand part of the language of the uneducated. Even then it wasn’t much used, as it could have been, in stories using slang. Mark Twain, for example, apparently never used OK. Why? Perhaps it was too boring, merely bureaucratic rather than in any way titillating.

Then along came Ade. He made slang respectable — and sometimes even fun.

For example, his collection More Fables (1900) includes:

The Head of the Concern put his OK on a Voucher for $43.60, and it occurred to him that Stereopticon Lectures seemed to be Advancing, but he asked no Questions.

People You Know (1903) includes these sentences:

She had conned herself into the Belief that some day she would run down a Queen Anne Shack that would be OK in all Particulars.

Any System is OK if it finally Works Out.

It was a lovely Time-Table that he had mapped out. He submitted it to Pet before she went away and she put her OK on it, even though her Heart ached for him.

And Ade’s Fables (1914) has:

He was OK except that he would have to lie still for a few Weeks while the Bones did their Knitting.

Possibly if she could be weaned away from her eccentric Relations and governed with a Firm Hand she would turn out OK.

Through the long watches of the night he played Blonde against Brunette and then went home with his Time-Card bearing the official OK.

Every one of these sentences uses OK in its respectable modern sense.

That’s not the only expression he introduced to polite company. Next time I’ll tell about another.