You cannot deny or otherwise disregard an event such as a twenty-thousand-year-long ice age. Planets move, and orbits change. Perhaps an orphaned (by host-star supernova) 'rogue' planet, an element of the 'dark matter' said to be 95% of all Universe, wanders through the solar system on a regular basis and disturbs our temporary certainties, perhaps not, but you cannot just ignore such a physical reality as an ice-age. With the sea-level 3-400 feet lower and the North Sea, English Channel and St, George's Channel dry and foraged where possible by reindeer, and with the country to the north under half a mile thickness of ice, you would be hard put to dispute the inconvenience of the experience, let alone argue for the sake of argument. Yet this last event was the fairly recent reality of our whole world.
The coastal edge of Western Europe was known as Gal, of which we still have vestiges, as in 'Portu gal, Gal icia, Gaul, Cornu gal es (Cornwall, with the 'g' changed to the modern English 'w', Gal es (Wales), Gal way, and Gallo way, with, to the far north in the Hebrides, and with the Shetlands unsuspected for twenty-thousand years under up to a mile of ice, Fin gal. Fingal was not a person; it was a place, the Land's End or Finisterre of then. And until only eight thousand years ago you could walk to England without wetting your feet.
Language was already used, the Neanderthals with their monosyllabic utterances with only the tone to indicate mood and meaning (think how many ways you can say 'yes' or 'no', and you will understand), having shuffled off this mortal coil. And language, apart from the invention of be-bop, evolves, and does not 'happen' spontaneously.
There was an ancient word 'ochee', now evolved to the Spanish words 'oquedad'' and 'hueco', which mean a hollow, vertical or horizontal, and possibly 'aqu' meaning 'here'.
During all this time, people lived in caves at a place now called Wookey, in Somerset, England, with the ice-cliffs, across a wide valley which in now the Bristol Channel, reaching into the sky across what we now know as 'South Wales', and so all around the globe, both North and South. Perhaps the majority of Canada and Patagonia and southern Africa were under ice. The temperuture inside the caverns was 12.5 - centigrade, i.e. tolerable.
So if you were at home, it was 'ochee', or OK, certainly more welcoming than outside. The caves in Somerset are now called Wookey Hole. In the erudite and informative book 'the Mendips' about the Mendip Hills, written by Coysh, Mason and Waite, and published by Robert Hale Limited in 1954, it reports that the historian Camden wrote in his book Britannia in 1558 that it was still called 'oqui hole'.
It is reassuring to reflect that an old vestige of the real world persists and flourishes as a familiar expression all languages common to this modern age.
This language long pre-dates the pet theories of modern academia, and should be seriously considered as a legitimate direct root of OK.
For fun, perhaps someone you know with an ouija board might care to ask whether 'OK' derived from 'oqui'. The response should be "yes".
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