WOJB radio broadcasts daily across the Ojibwa territory of northern Wisconsin. The station originates from Lac Coutre Oreilles Reservation, just sixty miles south of what the Ojibwa call Lake Gitchee Gumi, which we know as Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world and a traditional focal point of Great Lakes Ojibwa culture and mythology. The nonprofit station operates as one of the most important Indian stations in the nation, and one of the few native stations to broadcast east of the Mississippi River.
WOJB occupies a plain, windowless building. The structure looks more like a warehouse than a broadcast studio, but parked prominently in front of it is a large white satellite receiving dish bearing a black drawing of a stylized thunderbird, the sacred symbol of the messenger. The station fills the air with national and international news, information about upcoming ball games at the reservation high school, Ojibwa language classes from Lac Coutre Oreilles Community College, health and nutrition information, announcements of powwows, and fishing updates, as well as tribal myths, drum songs, and talks by the elders. Over the Labor Day weekend, each year for three full days, the station broadcasts the drum groups, singers, and speakers of the Protect the Earth Pow Wow.
“Woodland Community Radio,” as its name implies, reflects the life of the woodland people who live in the heart of North America. They live in the forests surrounded by tens of thousands of lakes dug out of the earth during the last glacial retreat. Most of the Ojibwa reservations, such as Lac du Flambeau and Fond du Lac, have French names that reflect the Indian heritage of the area. WOJB broadcasts from Lac Coutre Oreilles, which means Lake of the Short Ears, and is pronounced in modern English as “La Coot Oray” or reduced to its initials, LCO.
To reach the radio station, one must drive between a series of lakes and rows of small tourist cottages and A-frame structures marketed rather euphemistically as chalets, villas, or “hobby farms.” The lakes outnumber the small towns with their white-owned businesses catering to the two major industries, tourism and timber. The largest businesses seem to be bait-and-tackle stores, usually located close to warehouse liquor stores. In addition to the traditional taxidermists and canoe shops, the towns offer boat-repair services, hot-tub salesrooms, video rental stores, and the usual lineup of fast-food restaurants.
The Lutheran churches seem to come in about a half-dozen different sects, but the real religion of the area is high school ice hockey, which the locals pursue with a zeal that professional teams must envy. Ice hockey only barely takes precedence over ice fishing, cross-country skiing, and snowmobile driving in the winter, and canoeing, motorboating, and fishing in the summer.
Even after the ice-fishing houses legally have to be removed on the first of March, solitary fisherman squat over the holes in the ice until virtually the last possible day before “ice out.” Many of the communities have a simple and effective way of determining the exact day when “ice out” occurs. After driving over the frozen lakes and rivers with their cars and four-wheel-drive vehicles all winter, they park a rusty old clunker of a car on the ice in March. Locals then take bets and organize gambling pools on the exact day in April when the weather will warm up enough to melt the ice and send the hulk crashing through to the cold bottom of the lake.
Even though the radio station is very much an Ojibwa institution, it maintains a certain pan-Indian atmosphere. The walls of the station bear paintings, photographs, and craft objects from Indian nations across North America. The radio programming also reflects a multicultural world, with music from Hopi drummers and Inuit singers as well as interviews with Indians throughout America.
Despite the Indian orientation and Ojibwa focus of the radio station, it broadcasts its programs primarily in the English language. Aside from native songs and an occasional tribal elder speaking in Ojibwa, the announcers use English, the language most commonly understood by the native and immigrant audiences of Wisconsin. To use only the Ojibwa language would cut off virtually all the non-Indians, all the non-Ojibwa Indians, and even most of the Ojibwa, who now function better in English than in their ancestral tongue.
The common use of English by North American Indians leads some people to the conclusion that Indian languages have died. At Lac Coutre Oreilles, however, students from kindergarten through college study the Ojibwa language. Indian languages live often as a ceremonial or family language, but in public most Indians speak English.
Some languages, such as Navajo in the southwestern United States, Cree and Dene in northern Canada, and Inuit across the Arctic, still live as the common tongues of daily life. Other languages, like many of the Algonquian dialects of New England, have now become virtually extinct. In classrooms and night schools throughout Indian territory today, native speakers teach classes in Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Dakota, Lakota, Ojibwa, and dozens of other languages, but these languages show no signs of replacing English or of taking over again as the mother tongues of the people who lost them.
Although English has become the common language of Indians in North America, they have not abandoned their native tongues completely. Indian people have carried parts of their languages with them into English, and in the process they have helped to make English a more vibrant and important language. The English language has changed the lives of Native Americans, but they have also changed the English language.
Europeans, upon first arriving in America, lacked the words to name what they saw in the new environment. As Thomas Jefferson explained their plight, the “new circumstances … call[ed] for new words, new phrases, and the transfer of old words to new objects” (McCrum). They recognized some of the animals, such as deer, bears, and wolves, and misapplied European names to some creatures, such as buffalo and robins, but even when they exhausted all of these names, America had strange animals, plants, geographical configurations, and weather that needed new words. From the beginning the Europeans had to use Native American words to name animals such as moose, caribou, raccoon, opossum, chipmunk, barracuda, manatee, cougar, puma, jaguar, terrapin, chigger, and skunk.
They also had to use Indian names for trees and plants such as hickory, pecan, persimmon, mahogany, mangrove, maypop, mesquite, yucca, and saguaro. Particularly in the area of food plants, the colonists took many of the Indian names, including maize, hominy, squash, avocado, pemmican, manioc, cassava, papaya, pawpaw, tapioca, succotash, and scuppernong.
Even the topography of the continent appeared strange and alien to the Europeans, and they had to adopt Indian words such as the Choctaw bayou and the Taino savanna, the latter identifying a grassy plain with few trees, a concept also expressed by the Quechua word pampas. In the Canadian tundra, explorers adopted the Cree word muskeg to denote the sphagnum bogs of decaying vegetable matter. The upland coastal swamps usually found in wooded areas of the southern Atlantic Coast became known as pocosin from the Delaware word for such areas. The Algonquian word podunk, meaning a corner of isolated land or a small neck of land, passed into English as the name of a Massachusetts community, but came to signify any remote locale.
Spaniards brought up from South America the word chaco to apply to treeless savannas. Although some dictionaries give a Basque etymology for the word, it probably comes from the Quechua people, who use chaqo to describe a place that once had trees but no longer does. The word derives from the verb for communal net hunting for small animals, which the Quechua people did in open, treeless areas. The word became the name of a large part of Bolivia and Paraguay—the Gran Chaco—as well as the name of a canyon in New Mexico and other sites across the southwestern United States.
As America became more urban, many of these words denoting various kinds of rural environments became less common, but they could play a lifesaving role for early colonists and pioneers unaccustomed to the country. The words told them which areas they could pass through and which to avoid. In this way Indian terms formed the linguistic map of the new territory.
Even the weather of the Americas called for new words. The Europeans immediately recognized that the giant storms that blew up from the Caribbean in the late summer and fall far surpassed in scale and ferocity the simple squalls and rain showers implied in the English word storm. They had to use a Carib word, hurricane, to name the fierce storms of the Caribbean. Similarly, white settlers applied the Salish word chinook to both the moist, warm winds that blew in from the Pacific and the warm, dry winds that blew from the Rocky Mountains onto the northern plains of the United States and Canada. From the Paiute language the settlers took the word pogonip to describe the ice fog or clouds of ice crystals common in the western mountains.
The word blizzard probably derives from an Indian word, although its origin is now lost. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first written record of blizzard comes from the frontiersman Colonel Davy Crockett in 1834. Since Crockett used it without explanation, as though the reader would already know the word, we may assume that blizzard had already attained common usage by that time.
A concept in anthropology called naïve realism assumes that the words people use reflect the world around them precisely as the world is. A person, no matter what language used, perceives the world in fairly much the same way as any other person.
Even if we admit that all humans have the same basic potential for perception, the actual perceptions vary. An Arctic Inuk can judge the thickness and stability of sea ice much better than almost anyone else in the world. Bushmen of the Kalahari know how to track animals and humans over vast expanses of territory by seeing traces of evidence that would baffle anyone else. The footprint of a giraffe might be barely visible to a European, but the Bushman sees that the giraffe is a pregnant female listing slightly to the right from a flesh wound to the right hind leg.
Any human can learn to judge ice or track giraffes with the right teaching, but one needs the language to explain it. Europeans arrived in America with languages well suited to European geography, land, weather, animals, plants, seasons, and social structure. Words such as storm, tempest, squall, or gale perfectly describe European conditions, particulary coastal ones, but they do not convey the information needed to describe such things as an American hurricane, blizzard, or chinook. When William Shakespeare used the word tempest to describe a South Atlantic storm, it would not be the same if he had called his work The Hurricane. Someone who equates a tempest with a hurricane might mistake the calm eye of the storm for the end of the storm, a mistake that could have disastrous results.
Indian words invaded the English language well before the first English colonists came to settle. The colonists arrived in North America already using Indian words that had entered English via the Spanish language acquired through British trade and piracy in the Caribbean. These included words such as the Mayan cigar, Arawakan tobacco, Taino potato, and Nahuatl tomato. It even included the Taino word hammoc, the name for the Indian sleeping device eagerly adopted by British sailors for use on board ship.
Many South and Central American animals retained their original Indian names in Spanish and in English. From Quechua came the name for the llama, which English-speakers adopted with Spanish orthography and therefore mispronounced as lama instead of yama
Quechua also supplied the names for the vicuña and the condor. From Tupi languages, spoken throughout large parts of the Amazon basin, came the names for the piranha, with its razor teeth, the colorful toucan with its oversized bill, and the capybara, the world’s largest rodent, which swims in the waters of the Amazon. From Guarani, a language still spoken today as the second official language of Paraguay, came names for the tapir, a piglike creature, and the fierce jaguar. From the Aymara language spoken around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia came the names for the alpaca and the chinchilla. Even the word shark, which entered English late in the sixteenth century, probably came from an American language.
Many of the native American medicines had no counterparts in European languages. Particularly medicines from the tropical zones entered English through Spanish and kept their Indian names. These included quinine from Quechua, curare and tonka from Carib, ipecac and jaborandi from Tupi, and mescal, peyote, and tacamahac from the Aztec language of Nahuatl.
In the material culture of the Americas, English-speakers found even greater challenges. The English concept of the house simply did not adequately convey the variety of residential structures used in various ecological niches of America. The colonists learned to use the Algonquian word wigwam for homes made of bark on an arched, wooden frame; they also adopted the Algonquian wickiup for a similar temporary structure. On the plains, American settlers encountered the Dakota word tepee for the large, conical tent pavilions made of bison hides. In the north, the unusual domed ice houses required the Inuit word igloo to describe them. The Navajo homes built partially into the earth retained their Navajo name of hogan. The Nahuatl word jacal was used for the wattle-and-daub houses with thatched roofs found in Mexico and around the Caribbean, and the Nahuatl teocalli signified both the sacred mounds and the temples often built on them.
The material artifacts and clothing of the Indians required new words, since they came in forms unknown to the Europeans. The soft-skinned foot apparel of the Indians differed so much from European shoes that the settlers adopted the Algonquian word moccasin. For the same type of footwear made into a boot of deerskin or sealskin, they adopted the Inuit word mukluk. The natives of the Arctic also gave the world hooded jackets and the Aleut word parka to name them, which, when lined with fur, were sometimes also called by the Inuit anorak. The soft and exceptionally warm wool of the musk ox became known by the native name of quiviut.
The brightly embroidered smocks commonly worn by women in the Yucatàn and Central America acquired the Mayan name huipil. From the Spanish language, English acquired poncho, which referred to an Andean garment with a name derived from the Araucanian or Mapuche nation of Chile.
Indian inventions included the toboggan, a Micmac word for a sled with a curved front. In Alaska and northern Canada the Inuit people used similar sleds pulled by special dogs, which they called huskies in the Inuit language. In New England the natives often slung a rope around the forehead or chest to ease the weight of a heavy loads on their backs; this rope bore the name of tump in Algonquian and came into English as tumpline.
By the time the English and French arrived in North America, they already used the Arawak or Carib word canoe for the light boats of the Indians. Christopher Columbus himself had introduced that word to Europeans after his first voyage, making it one of the first Native American words to become part of European languages and eventually an internationally used word. Other native words for water transportation included the Mosquito word dory for a dugout with high sides and a flat bottom, and the Inuit words kayak and umiak for two different kinds of boats made of skins.
The natives of America also used new weapons such as the war club with a stone or metal blade inserted into it and called tomahawk in Algonquian. From the Nahuatl language we took the much less commonly used word atlatl for the spear-thrower used to hurl spears with greater force and accuracy than throwing them by hand would permit.
Many Indian ceremonial and religious objects had no counterparts in Europe, and thus retained their traditional names. This applied to the Algonquian wampum, which consisted of a string of woven beads made from welk shells and used to record important treaties and events in pictographic writing. The Hopis of the Southwest made small dolls called kachinas to represent spirits in their ceremonies. Many groups in the Southwest conducted their religious ceremonies in the underground rooms for which the Hopi word kiva has generally been used. Dried gourds containing seeds, shaken to provide rhythmic accompaniment in many religious ceremonies, kept their Tupi name maracas, although in English the word became more associated with nightclub entertainment and Caribbean bands playing on the beach than with a religious ritual.
Indian social life seemed organized on principles much different from European models, and often required new words to designate the people and their social roles. Even what it meant to be a woman or child varied from the European system, and English speakers began using the Algonquian words squaw and papoose, a linguistic distinction that shows the degree to which the colonists saw an Indian woman or infant as different from a European woman or infant. Nowhere did Indian social terms assume greater importance than in the political sphere, where settlers and natives had to conduct commerce, make bargains and agreements, and negotiate treaties. Various words came into use to designate the different kinds of Indian leaders. In the Southern States, cacique became common after the Spaniards learned it from the Taino. In its feminine form, caciqua, the word found use in describing women leaders such as the Lady of Cutifachiqui, but the word found little acceptance in common English.
In the Algonquian-speaking areas, sachem became the most common term for a leader, with the Abnaki word sagamore used to designate a lower chief. The Natick term mugwump came to signify an independent-minded politician who did not follow the party line, and the Chinook word muckamuck found its place in English as a mocking term to describe any high official or pompous person. The New England colonists used the Narraganset word netop as a synonym for friend, especially when referring to a friendly native, and they used it as a friendly term of address.
Because they came from a political system just emerging from feudalism and still based on authoritarian control, Europeans had little experience in making decisions by consensus. When they sat down with Indians along the East Coast, they learned the concept of group meetings, which the Algonquian-speaking peoples called caucus. A holy man called a powwow often accompanied the meetings. Because such holy men often danced, the English began applying the word to any celebration of the Indians, but they also applied it to their own celebrations.
One of the strangest events that the Europeans saw was the ritualized giving away of possessions that commonly occurred among Indians on the plains and along the north Pacific Coast. No such concept existed in any European language, and the settlers adopted the Chinook and Nootka word potlatch for it. Even after the word was adopted into English, however, the Canadian government outlawed any such unproductive activity and imprisoned native people who sponsored or even attended a potlatch.
In total, the Indian languages of the Americas gave English approximately two hundred relatively common words, of which about eighty came from the Indian languages of the United States and Canada, and the remainder from the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America. In addition to the daily words of common English, Indian languages supplied more than a thousand words that have more specialized and less commonly known use. These include many of the plants and animals that have limited habitats and thus a more limited use for their names. They include words from a variety of languages, such as the Catawba word yaupon for a type of evergreen holly; wapiti, a Shawnee word for a deer with a white rump; and titi, the Tupi name for a small monkey.
Scholars Latinized many of the Native American names so that they could be used as scientific terms and names. Altogether, counting common and scientific words, English now contains about 2,200 words taken directly from the native languages of America.
Through thousands of years of linguistic evolution, the languages of Europe grew rich and heavy in nouns, but poor in verbs. English, like the other European languages, shows a strong proclivity toward naming objects and thus easily takes in foreign words as nouns. It borrows far fewer verbs. Instead, English speakers seem content to use weak verbs such as to be and to have, both of which are vague almost to the point of meaninglessness. The verb to be serves as little more than a linking verb joining two nouns or a noun and adjective. Some European languages, such as Russian, have gone so far as to drop the verb to be in the present tense and simply string together nouns and their modifiers.
In adopting Native American words into English, the colonists usually made the word into a noun, no matter what type of speech part the word may be in the native language; thus virtually all the Indian words came into English as nouns, the names of things. English speakers adopted virtually no native verbs, adjectives, or adverbs.
Frequently, English speakers could not find a single noun for an Indian concept, and they had to take in a small phrase or string of words that could be translated into English. A new richness came into English through the translation of these Indian phrases and concepts. Often these phrases related to war, such as “going on the warpath,” “scalp hunting,” or “putting on warpaint.” Just as frequently they related to the termination of fighting through the peacemaking process, in phrases such as “burying the hatchet,” a phrase that came from the ancient legend of how the five tribes of the Iroquois confederacy united by burying their weapons beneath a tree. Similarly, “smoking the peace pipe” comes from an important social practice found commonly among native people throughout the plains, the Great Lakes region, and the eastern United States and Canada. Although humor usually ranks as one of the most difficult things to translate, a certain lighthearted quality also crept across the language barrier with phrases such as “playing possum.”
From early colonial times, spiritual translations also passed into English with references to “the Great Spirit” and “the Happy Hunting Ground.” The latter phrase possibly originated as false Indian translation of something invented by a missionary, but it made its way back into English as well as into diverse native languages.
Many of the native American languages lacked the flexibility of English in admitting foreign words. These agglutinative languages added meaning through the extensive uses of prefixes, suffixes, and even infixes, which could be lumped together in long trains of syllables. Because the precise placement and sequence of these syllables bore such importance, speakers of many of these languages found it almost impossible to adopt European words or even other Indian words with the same facility that English incorporated Indian words.
In an agglutinative language such as Paiute, spoken in Utah, a single, albeit very long, word could convey what requires a whole phrase in English. The phrase “they who are going to sit and cut up a black cow” becomes a single word, wii-to-kuchum-punku-rugani-yugwi-va-ntu-m, which literally means “knife-black-buffalo-pet-cut-up-sit-future-participle-animate plural” (Sapir). In Chinook the word i-n-i-a-l-u-d-am meaning “I came to give it to her,” consists of a root word (d, “to give”), six prefixes, and a suffix. The whole sentence “I will go” in Hoopa, a language of northern California, becomes a short word, te-s-e-ya-te, consisting of a root, three prefixes, and a suffix (Sapir).
Because of the difficulty in taking foreign words into the agglutinative languages, most of the native languages invented new descriptive terms that combined older words in new ways. Thus, in the Paiute phrase mentioned above, the Pauite-speakers used their native words for buffalo and pet to name the unusual cows brought by the settlers into America. It was easier for them to put together two old Pauite words than to borrow the English cow or Spanish vaca.
A train could be an “iron horse” in one language and a “fire wagon” in another. In Menominee, for example, the modern idea of “telephoning” was translated into the Menominee word sequence meaning literally “little-wire speech” (Bloomfield). American Indian languages had a highly metaphorical aspect in which a fish might be known as a “deer of the water,” or thunder could be called “his glance,” referring to some unknown entity in the sky.
Many Algonquian languages expressed a new concept by combining apparently opposite entities such as water and fire to make the word scoutiouabou, “firewater,” for the whiskey introduced by the European settlers. The Ojibwa people, who also spoke an Algonquian language, made wabinesiwin, or “paleface,” to represent the people of European descent.
In an unusual boomerang effect, these descriptive terms made their way from the Indian languages back into English in translation. They became so much a part of American frontier speech that it is difficult to ascertain which came originally from a native language and which may have been invented by native English speakers in imitation of the Indian practice.
English-speaking settlers soon adopted the Indian practice of combining opposing concepts or highly implausible combinations of words to make new words. Thus, such very different creatures as the frog and the bull became bullfrog, or “fish” and “cat” became catfish.
English already had the capacity to make compound nouns, but the transplanting of English to America intensified and expanded this linguistic trait. Settlers often signified bad things simply by attaching the word poison as a prefix to a standard noun. Thus the colonists quickly learned to avoid poison ivy, poison oak, poisonwood, poison dogwood, poison elder, and poison sumac. In a parallel development, many of the Africans brought to America applied the English word snake, instead of poison to signify something that should be avoided. On Daufuski Island, one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, islanders warned their children about snakebush, snakeweed, and snakeroot, a common plant that, if eaten by a cow or goat, will make her milk deadly to humans as well as to calves and kids.
Other English word combinations were used to describe new things in America, such as rattle and snake or prickly and pear. New double words included live oak, June bug, red cedar, bloodroot, chokecherry, sugar maple, and both peanut and ground nut.
Sometimes Indian words combined with English words to create bilingual compounds as in pokeweed and pokeberry, which made a virtual prefix from the Algonquian word pak, meaning “blood.” One plant with a similar name was the puccoon; settlers translated it into English literally as bloodroot, which looks like it could have been in the English language for millennia. Scholars then translated it into Latin as Sanguinaria canadensis for its scientific name. Through similar fashion, many Indian words show up in English and even in other languages in direct translation. Such transformations keep their meanings but change the sounds, thus leaving little evidence of their native etymology.
The Indians who lived on supposedly alcohol-free reservations called the liquor that had to be smuggled into them bootleg because of the manner in which it was smuggled. This term eventually spread to general use throughout America. Similarly the translated Indianisms of firewater and joywater enjoyed a wide usage. From the Chinook trade language, the word hooch or hootch spread as a term for a particularly cheap form of liquor named for the Hochinoo (or Hootznahoo) tribe of Alaska.
New words and phrases opened a rich vein of linguistic development in American English. The mixture of this new descriptive speech pattern and traditional English appreciation of such linguistic devices as alliteration and rhyme inspired whole new vocabularies. A place that sold “hooch” was likely to have all manner of illegal, particularly lewd, activity around it, and this became hootchykootchy, a word popularized by the gyrating gymnastic dances that Little Egypt performed at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a world’s fair in celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America.
Respectable people who shied away from hootchy-kootchy joints called the men who frequented them punks, a word with a twisted origin from the Delaware language, where it signified “touchwood,” the pieces of fast-burning wood used to light fires. The word transferred from the lighting mechanism to the cigars or cigarettes being lit with them, and finally, in the late nineteenth century, to the people who smoked such cigarettes in public. Eventually it merged with an older English usage to mean any delinquent lower-class person who violated the norms of the middle class. The earliest connotations of the word still linger in the image of a punk leaning on a street corner with a cigarette dangling from his lip. The evolution of the slang word fag for a cigarette closely parallels that of punk. The English word faggot referred to bundles of twigs used to start fires and eventually became a slang term for a cigarette.
The etymology of colorful slang words such as hooch and punk traveled a more easily detected path than a more prosaic verb like honk, as in the simple sentence, “the goose honked as she flew over the pond.” It is hard to visualize a time when we did not have a way of describing the sound made by the great flocks of Canadian geese that annually migrated north and south over America. Prior to the nineteenth century, however, English speakers, being attuned to the sensibilities of peasants rather than foresters, woodsmen, hunters, or environmentalists, called the sounds of geese and ducks by the single term quack.
The first recorded use of the verb honk comes from Henry Thoreau’s 1854 description of birds flying over Walden Pond. The trail ends there. Did Thoreau invent the word after listening to what the Europeans called the “quacking” of the goose? With the heavy borrowing of words into English from the Indians of New England, it is no coincidence that honck is the Narraganset or Wampanoag word for Canada goose.
From simple beginnings the word honk has led a rich life after adapting to a more colorful environment of slang, music, and sex than Thoreau experienced around Walden Pond. With the invention of the automobile and the installation of horns on them, drivers drafted honk to describe the sound that their horns made, and thus the word became an important verb without which it is hard to think of how we would describe public life and places in twentieth century urban settings.
Another line of descendants from the word honk went underground in an etymology that becomes difficult to follow through the dimly lit world of nightclubs. Musicians applied honk to tinny, brassy music and to the places where it was played for poor, urban African Americans. Thus arose the honkytonk, from where the term gradually crept out to include similar nocturnal gathering places of poor whites. When African Americans moved on to jazz and a new argot invented for it, the word honkytonk clung to the music of the poor whites, and eventually honky itself became a mildly derogatory name for whites, who were also called rednecks or crackers.
Another long and imaginative history comes to light when we pursue the word okay. The stories behind it seem as varied as the imaginations of the lexicographers and etymologists who penned them. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first printed use of the word appeared on June 18, 1840, in the Boston Atlas. “The band rode in on a stage which had a barrel of Hard Cider in the baggage rack, marked with large letters ‘O.K.’—oll korrect.”
By September of that year the New Orleans Picayune had also given the meaning of O.K. as “oll korrect” in one of its articles, but the same newspaper also pointed out that the initials could just as easily mean “orful katastrophe” or “orful kalamity.” Other newspapers gave the meaning as “Old Konnecticut” “Out of Kash,” “Out of Klothes,” “Out of Kharacter.” The latter etymologies seem equally as valid as the first.
This cabalistic use of the word comes from the O.K. Club of New York City, supposedly organized in honor of Martin Van Buren, who was born in Kinderhook, New York, and thus acquired the nickname “Old Kinderhook.” The group took the name “O.K. Club” in 1840, when they discarded their former name, “Old Butt-Enders.” In addition to calling themselves the O.K. Club, they also advertised themselves with a banner reading “K.K.K.K.K.”—“Kinderhook Kandidate Kant Kome It Kwite” (Read). This use of alliterative k’s bears no relation to the post-Civil War KKK or Klu Klux Klan.
Despite all of the fretting over cabalistic uses of k’s in nineteenth-century politics, none of these analyses offers any explanation for how that political usage of O.K. jumped to the common meaning ascribed to okay, meaning “everything is fine” or “no problems.” The folk etymology of okay skips the politics and ascribes the derivation to egregious presidential spelling. According to this theory, the word okay came from poorly educated Andrew Jackson, who served as President from 1829 to 1837 and supposedly marked his presidential papers with the initials O.K. to indicate “ole kurrek” (all correct). The only problem with such a story is that we have many papers and letters written or signed by Andrew Jackson as general and president, but never do the initials O.K. appear.
A British etymology, while acknowledging that the term is mostly an Americanism, postulates that it derived from a brand of English sauce bottled under a colorful label that read “O.K.” Sauce. Such an etymology hardly accounts for the finer semantic nuances of the word okay. A manufacturer might use adjectives such as great, super, fine, elegant, royal, rich, creamy, smooth, delightful, or even a simple good, but it is doubtful that many Americans would be persuaded to buy a product that described itself as merely okay.
A native American contender for the true etymology of okay comes from the Choctaw language, where the word oke meant “it is” or “it is so.” The Choctaws inhabited the lower Mississippi River area until their removal to the Indian Territory by Andrew Jackson between 1830 and 1837. The Choctaws speak a Muskogean language, and it is from their words okla homa (which mean “red people”) that comes the name given to the Indian Territory upon its entry as a state into the United States.
Prior to their removal and the colonization of the present states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, the Choctaws’ language served as the general trade language of the area much the way Chinook served as a trade language in the northwestern United States. Like any trade languages used by foreign speakers, Choctaw offered an abbreviated vocabulary associated with barter and the exchange of goods. The word oke occurred frequently in such exchanges, signifying that the two parties were in agreement—a usage very close to what it still is in modern English.
The first half of the nineteenth century saw the opening of this area to settlement by colonists from the Carolinas and Georgia; this was the western frontier. Andrew Jackson himself fought repeated battles in this area against the Creeks in the war of 1812 and again in the interminable war against the Seminoles. After election to the presidency in 1828, Jackson also oversaw the removal of all the Southeastern tribes, including the Choctaw. During his two terms in office, the Southwestern states along the Mississippi River occupied a focal point in American domestic issues.
This Southwestern frontier produced many national heroes and politicians, including Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and the cronies who came to office with Andrew Jackson and his Democrats in the elections of 1828 and 1832. It should be of little surprise that, considering the national political focus on this area and its people, a frontier word such as oke would appear in New York and Boston newspapers by 1840.
The word filled an important void in the language. It spread quickly among the common people during the later nineteenth century, but the educated class fiercely and tenaciously resisted such street slang. Woodrow Wilson did much to popularize the term among journalists and more powerful people in the twentieth century by signing his official papers okeh, the spelling that he thought came closest to the original Choctaw. Despite this presidential endorsement and a common acceptance of the word in speech, academics and schoolmarms continued to wince at its usage in written language.
Undeterred by the preferences of schoolteachers, okay spread beyond America to other English-speaking parts of the globe, and then to other languages. Today, okay, pops up as frequently in German or Spanish as in English, and it has even entered common speech in Arabic, Russian, and Japanese. Okay may become the first truly international word understood in every country of the world.
Another international word that may have an Indian pedigree is Yankee, the name by which citizens of the United States became known throughout the world. Dictionaries cautiously offer a variety of potential etymologies that vary with the inclinations and imaginations of writers. Perhaps Yankee derives from the Dutch name Jan or its diminutive, Janke, both of which occurred frequently in the old Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. An alternative derivation posits the origin as Jan plus kees, the Dutch word for cheese, but it remains unclear why anyone would want to use such a combination of words.
In addition to the Dutch origin for Yankee, we have a French contender. This etymology surmises that Yankee might be a poor pronunciation of the French word Anglais, the name they applied to the English settlers. The Scottish theory proposes that Yankee came from the Scottish term yank, meaning a hard blow. The reasons behind such a possible use of the word remain as obscure as the Dutch-cheese etymology.
Before scholars proposed any of these origins from European languages, we already had a native American possibility. The oldest recorded etymology derives from the travel narratives of Thomas Anbury, who served as a British officer during the American Revolution. Writing in 1789, not long after the term became popular, he derived Yankee from eankke, a Cherokee word meaning “slave” or “coward” (Mencken).
Whether or not this Cherokee origin represents the precisely correct etymology, Thomas Anbury’s analysis seems to point us in the generally correct direction. Yankee probably descends from an Indian name applied with derision to the whites or perhaps to the English in particular, and it probably found wide usage among Cherokees as well as among other Indian nations. Examination of the historical record reveals similar usage of the term by other groups as well.
The Lenni-Lenape (Delaware) used a similar word to refer to the white settlers. In the Walam Olum, the written history of the Lenni-Lenape beginning about the year 1600 and continuing to the ninetenth century, they refer to the English as the Yankwis, but often they use the even more derogatory name Yankwako, meaning “English snake” (Spicer 1969).
Since its spread into American English during the colonial era, Yankee has become an international name used to identify the people of the United States. Its use becomes particularly important when foreigners wish to distinguish people of the United States from Canadians and Mexicans, who are also North Americans, or from South Americans, who also share the name American. Because English offers no other single word to designate the rather cumbersome phrase “citizen of the United States,” the shorter word Yankee stepped in to fill the linguistic void.
No scholar of language writing in 1492 would have had reason to suspect that English might one day become an international language used throughout the world and spoken by far more people outside England than within it. The changes necessary to make this happen did not occur automatically. Before English could become an international language, it needed a tremendous expansion and revitalization that it never could have received in England. That change began in North America, where the provincial language of England was filled with new words, phrases, and concepts. The changes continued as English became the language of British colonial administration in India, Africa, and the South Pacific, but none of these other areas inspired the extensive changes brought about by the native languages of the Americas.
English survives today as a tribal language mixed together from the tongues of the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, with some Gaelic and Norse additions. The tribal Norsemen who settled in France and became known as the Normans brought a heavy dose of French into English, and as the English incorporated the Gaelic peoples around them, they added a few of their words as well. When the language came to America, the Choctaw, Ojibwa, Cherokee, Muskogee, Seminole, and dozens of others added to the European tribal language of the Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Celts, Vikings, and Normans.