Kids these days! You can’t understand a thing they are saying! Why can’t they just talk normal and, while they’re at it, why can’t they give their kids good old fashioned NORMAL names?
Have you ever caught yourself voicing those sentiments? Well, sit back and let me tell you the tale of a group of highly educated and young individuals and what they did for fun.
I don’t say this with a judgmental spirit but Boston, Massachusetts has a bit of an air about it. It’s hard to say the name without contorting our faces into a snobbish demeanor and giving the word an arrogant accent. But it was in this very city that this group of young people frittered away their day, amusing themselves with misspelling words and coming up with slang words. “Popular abbreviations included “KY” for “No use” (“know yuse”), “KG” for “No go” (“Know go”), and “OW” for all right (“oll wright”).”1 None of these really caught on except for one. “OK” is “an abbreviation for “oll korrect,” a popular slang misspelling of “all correct.””2
The humor in Boston is as different as its accent. A very contemporary newspaper editor wanted to poke fun at the Providence Journal. Boston Post editor Charles Gordon wrote an editorial and at the end of a paragraph, he wrote “o.k.” I don’t get the joke, but this must have been considered quite a zinger on this day in 1839. From this day forward, “o.k.” became a part of American vocabulary and it is still used
today, 185 years later.3
Do you suppose people in the 1800s said, “Kids these days! You can’t understand a thing they are saying!”
This little factoid about “ok” reminded me of something Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 1:9-11. “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. (10) Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. (11) There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”
Enduring Word Commentary gives this insight: “Despite all man’s work and progress, life seems monotonously the same. Things that seem new get old very quickly, so it could be said “there is nothing new under the sun.””
Everything that is “new” is just a remake of the old or a repurposing of old elements. However, if you are truly desiring something new, the Bible has the answer. It begins with what we read in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
There may be nothing new under the sun where man lives, but the child of God has been saved by the Lord ABOVE. Once we are saved:
- We are that new creation in Christ;
- We have put on the new man (Ephesians 4:24);
- We received a new purity (1 Corinthians 5:7);
- We have a new way of accessing Heaven’s throne room (Hebrews 10:19-20);
- We live under a new commandment (John 13:34);
- We have new help from the angels (Psalm 91:11);
- We have been given a new name (Revelation 2:17).
So, what’s new with you today? Is everything okay?
p.s. In the opening paragraph, I mentioned the weird names that are used today. If we lived in the 1800s, here are some names that would have been OK to use: Algernon, Annis, Emrys, Franziska, Ivor, Keziah, Mahala, Septimus, Thomasina, Tryphena, and more.4 I won’t even mention what names kids got tagged with in Bible days. Today’s names are no more weird or different than they were back then. So, whatever someone names their kid, that’s THEIR business and it’ll be… OK!
1https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ok-enters-national-vernacular
2Ibid.
3https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2017/03/23/boston-morning-post-ok/
4https://nameberry.com/list/1021/victorian-names-from-the-1800s/all
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