OK原来并不招人待见，美国人由于一个玩笑创造了它，却连小说家也不喜欢使用它。谁又能想到，如今OK代表了美国人的一种性格。快来听一听，OK的华丽转身吧。
Mark Twain
Brett Hart
Louisa May Alcott
cozy
Thomas Harris
Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, it was well-known, but there were places where it was not used. And one of them was by writers of fiction. All the good writers seemed to avoid OK, like Mark Twain, who certainly used slang, and Brett Hart. Both of them could easily have used OK. They must have known it. But they avoided it. What did they use in its place? Just something like 'all right' or 'that will do' or whatever else. And then there's a very interesting case. Louisa May Alcott wrote a book called 'Little Women' about twenty years after OK was invented. And, in it, there's one OK in a letter from one of the girls to her sisters. And then that was revised for a second edition, and OK was removed and 'cozy' was put in instead. So everything is 'cozy' instead of everything is 'OK.' So there must have been some sense that OK was too silly a term to use even in fiction. How does OK in our vocabulary represent who we are as Americans? One way that it represents who we are is that it represents the pragmatic sense of getting it done. Maybe not getting it done perfectly, but it's OK. But the other way began with a book published in 1967 by a guy named Thomas Harris. The book is called 'I'm OK. You're OK.' And the book happens to be about a kind of psychology known as transactional analysis. Now most of us have either forgotten or never heard about transactional analysis. But that brilliant statement, 'I'm OK. You're OK,' which happens also to be the only famous quotation ever involving OK, is one that has seeped into our American consciousness. And I think nowadays we as a people are much more tolerant than we used to be, partly because 'I'm OK', that means I can do what I want. 'You're OK', you can do what you want. Maybe we aren't doing the same thing, but that's OK.