According to a New York Times article, the way to “scare your young co-workers” is to type “O.K.” instead of “kk.” A young worker explains:

To write “O.K.” or “K,” they tell me, is to be passive-aggressive or imply that I would like the recipient to drop dead.”

The article puts this generation gap in perspective:

A parting thought: Sociolinguistic research — which, until recently, tended to treat gender as binary — largely indicates that young women are the drivers of language change. (The authors of a frequently cited 2009 article from the journal “Language” found that men often lag “a full generation behind” — perhaps because they “retreat from or resist a change after it becomes associated with women.”) I don’t know for sure if the co-workers you mention are women but, on the off-chance you work with any, it’s never a bad time to remind yourself that studies (and women) find that women who talk at work are regularly dismissed, interrupted or ignored.

Mickey OK image.
Kk image.

Discussion:

• What’s your view of the differences among “Okay,” “O.K.,” “OK,” “K,” and “kk”? Do you see them the way this article describes? What, if any, role does gender play in your interpretation?

• The article reminds me of a 2015 study about periods in texts, apparently a signal for something dramatically final instead of how I use them—to end sentences like this one. How has punctuation use in texts changed over time?