“O.K.,” “K,” “kk”

In The New York Times, a Q & A column about workplaces covers “kk,” which some younger people apparently prefer to “OK” or “K” in e-mail and texts.

The Q A-er, Caity Weaver, endorses kk:

You reply to an email with “O.K.”: For the briefest twinkling, I think “Rude.”

You reply to an email with “K”: For one terrible millisecond, I think (sobbing and feeling attacked), “He’s acting like he’s the only one who’s stressed out!”

You reply to an email with “kk”: I think “O.K.”

“Kk” is an ice-cold glass of blood: mostly neutral, slightly basic.

“An ice-cold glass of blood”? That’s a good thing? A MetaFilter thread is devoted to figuring out this brand-new metaphor. Someone there discovered Weaver’s tweeted explanation:

It’s ice cold because that’s my preferred drink temperature and when I wrote that down I thought it was funny — no other reason 🤪 And it’s blood because I wanted a glass of something that was slightly basic on the pH scale

I'm amused that a writer who appears so attuned to the damaging effects of one- and two-letter abbreviations is willing to use a metaphor that is, well, baffling — and blood-chilling!

“A nice hot cup of tea” or “a warm cup of cocoa” might be a better metaphor. (It would certainly taste better.) And the problems (or non-problems, I’d say) of “O.K.” and “K” could be avoided by making a keyboard shortcut to turn “OK” into the friendly, dowdy “Okeydoke.”

Capische?

One practical reason to avoid “kk”: the danger, especially on a phone, of accidentally adding a third “k.”