I'm woefully out-of-touch with American life.  It's incredible how much some things have changed over the last seven and a half years, since I moved from Ohio to Amsterdam.

Take text-messaging, for instance.  When I left America, mobile telephony was nowhere near as common as it is today.  In fact, I didn't get my first mobile phone until I moved to the Netherlands.  At that point, people mostly used cell phones for making phone calls.  Over time, though, text-messaging started to become popular -- in Europe as well as in North America -- and though the technological part of it didn't give me any troubles (I actually wonder if Europeans may have adapted to text-messaging more quickly than Americans), I just couldn't keep up with the popular American usage and cultural evolution of the technology.  Text-messaging short-hand in particular.  I heard about it in the media, and I understood the ways that the 4s and 8s and R's and U's and consonant contractions were supposed to save time and space -- but I genuinely thought that it was just a silly thing that high-school sophomores did, like practicing your "autograph" a thousand times on the back of your Trapper-Keeper.

After a week of trying to assimilate back into my "home" culture, though, I realize that I was seriously mistaken.  Text-messaging is at a totally different level than I ever anticipated.  And the usage of the text-messaging short-hand is far more widespread than I had ever imagined.  Last Friday, I responded to one of my friend's text messages with a suggestion and he wrote back "k."  I knew that his single-letter response meant "OK / Affirmative" (I'm not that clueless about text-messaging short-hand).  But when I laughed about the incident to my sister and her husband, saying that I would have to harass my friend (who's my age) about his teeny-bopper short-hand, they stared at me with blank looks on their faces that told me how far off from reality I was.  It turns out that "k" is a perfectly professional and adult way of responding to text messages -- confirmed by several people my age or older, with occupations as prestigious or more prestigious than my own -- and, if anything, it's considered just plain silly to write back the extravagantly overblown two-letter version of the affirmative response.

As you can see, I'm woefully out-of-touch with American life and linguistics.

Part of me wants to be indignant and stubborn about this -- pouting about how text-messaging "impoverishes" the English language, fussing and fretting about grammar and syntax.  But ultimately, I don't want to be that guy.  Truth be told, American linguistics have always been about adaptation and transition.  Looking up the history of the phrase, "OK" (or "okay," depending on your preference), it's easy to see that "k" is every bit as good as any of the other derivatives.  No one actually knows what the "O" and the "K" are actually supposed to stand for.  Some think it's a bastardization of the Choctaw (Native American) word "okeh," which means "it is indeed."  Others suggest that it's an adaptation of the Greek phrase "Ola kala," meaning "everything's good" or "all good" -- brought into popular usage by Greek railway workers in the United States during the 1800s, as the initials were stamped on various shipments to indicate that they were ready to go.  Still others trace the usage of "O.K." back to Martin van Buren's campaign for the American presidency, in the late 1830s, in which he used the abbreviated version of his nickname, "Old Kinderhook."  But the most widely accepted etymology of "OK" goes back to an American fad during the early part of the 1800s, in which comic misspellings of common phrases were abbreviated and cemented in the public consciousness:  "K.G." for "Know Good" (no good) and "N.S." for "Nuff Said" (enough said)... and, most notably, "O.K." for "Oll Korrect" (all correct).  Some very interesting -- and widely varied -- theories, wouldn't you say?

Ultimately, no one really knows how the phrase "OK" came into popular usage.  We just know that it was an American phenomenon -- though it's now been adopted by hundreds of other languages -- and that it was likely based on some sort of "incorrect" grammar (possibly intentional).  Based on all these criteria, then, the text-messaging "k" seems to be a surprisingly appropriate adaptation of the old terminology.  I may not like it, and I may be slow to adapt to the cultural transitions -- but hey, such is the American way.  K?