The explanation on ‘OK’ seems good, but what about ‘okay?’ Is there anything special about how it came to be written out longer? I have always written it as ‘okay,’ because I assumed that the shorter version came later, what with lazy chatspeakers and all. Upon looking it up in my own dictionary, it simply says ‘also spelled okay’ (and, on another note, has the OK Club explanation). Being a Grammar Nazi myself, I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been fooling myself all this time into thinking I was doing it right, and would like some clarity.
This is actually a case of parallel development. “O.K.,” as we all know, comes from Oll Korrect. However, the alternate form “okay” comes from the remarkably coincidental usage of the name of an Irishman, Seamus O’Kay, in a very similar context. He was well known to be an honest and upright man; when people wished to bestow a compliment on another, they would compare them to the good Irishman, to wit, “He’s an O’Kay.” When this usage collided, through the immigration of the period, with the already-extant “O.K.,” there was, of course, an immediate melding of the two. The variant spelling of “okay” is our sole evidence of this previous form, with the only loss being the capitalization, the apostrophe, and the preceding article.
In a further remarkable coincidence, Seamus O’Kay had a son who went to Liverpool and spent many years baking Kalidis Co. Pies, as well as a fraternal twin sister with a penis.
“Heko” is a Lakota word meaning “totally screwed up.” (Literally it means “deer that has shit so hard its intestines are trailing behind it and tangling up its hind feet.”)