Today’s Word of the Day prompt is INITIAL
My initial reaction was to recall various initials we recognize today. Some are historic, the initials of famous people that most North Americans are familiar with:
and 
and organizations like 
, 
and the 
Here in Canada we have our own popular acronyms, like the
, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And there are many initials used for sports organizations, like the 
, the 
, etc.
I thought of current initials, unheard of when I was a girl, that denote health woes of our day:
and 
and my own past health woe, 
, which stands for chronic lymphocytic leukemia
Then I recalled the most famous initials of all time:
This is such a well known acronym — if you want to call it that — that various devises and many computer sites routinely ask you, when you’re done and satisfied that the work is complete, to hit OK.
Who was this unknown OK, who jotted his initials on things–or important documents?—so often that they’re so widely used? With it’s common variation, OKAY, this term has become so universal that, hundreds of years later, we’re still using them?
And more importantly, where would we be without them?
Okay, enough said. There are oodles more well known initials, but I think this will suffice as my response to the prompt.
Note: Initials done in the Masque font by Apostrophic Labs, at 1001fonts.com
Okay, Christine, I HAD to look it up! I’ve often wonder where “ok” or “okay” originated, and what I just discovered is that no one knows for sure 🙂 The closest guess, though, is that in the early 1800’s it was for “Orl Korrect,” a jokey spelling of “all correct,” and that it was widely popularized in America during the mid-1900s. I really don’t know what I think about all that, but I guess it’s ok if I don’t ever know for sure 🙂
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My husband looked it up once years ago and that was his finding, too. Some sources say it was a quality control inspector in a British factory back in the 1800s. A person could write a whole tale about that chappie!
Some gave your origin, or something like it. Which really doesn’t make sense unless one is Cockney, but fits the letters. Who knows. (Maybe we could make those initials popular? WK?)
To think I missed LOL and LOFL! Or our famous RCMP, the now-unmounted Mounties. 🙂
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The one it took me a while to figure out was SMH–shake my head 🙂
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I’ve never heard that one.
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With the growth of social media, initials have become part of everyday written language. I can’t keep up with it LOL!
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