Richard Lederer

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What's in a president's name?

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | In the 1830s in New England, there was a craze for initialisms, in the manner of the currently popular T.G.I.F. and P.D.Q.

The fad went so far as to generate letter combinations of intentional misspellings: K.G. for "know go" and O.W. for "oll wright." O.K. for "oll korrect" naturally followed.

Of all the loopy initialisms and misspellings of the time, O.K. alone survived.

That's because of a presidential nickname that consolidated the letters in the national memory.

Martin Van Buren, elected our eighth president in 1836, was born in Kinderhook, N.Y., and, early in his political career, was dubbed "Old Kinderhook."

Echoing the "Oll Korrect" initialism, O.K. became the rallying cry of the Old Kinderhook Club, a political organization supporting Van Buren during the 1840 campaign.

The coinage did Van Buren no good, and he was defeated in his bid for re-election.

But the word honoring his name today remains what H. L. Mencken identified as "the most shining and successful Americanism ever invented."

Match the presidential nicknames in the left-hand column with the presidents in the second column:

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1. The Great Emancipator	a. James Buchanan
2. Old Hickory	b. Calvin Coolidge
3. The Father of His Country	c. Dwight David Eisenhower
4. The Sage of Monticello	d. Ulysses S. Grant
5. Ike	e. William Henry Harrison
6. Tricky Dick	f. Andrew Jackson
7. Silent Cal	g. Thomas Jefferson
8. Tippecanoe	h. Abraham Lincoln
9. Unconditional Surrender	i. Richard M. Nixon
10. Old Rough and Ready	j. Ronald Reagan
11. The Gipper	k. Franklin D. Roosevelt
12. The New Dealer	l. Teddy Roosevelt
13. The Schoolmaster	m. William Howard Taft
14. The Rough Rider	n. Zachary Taylor
15. Big Bill	o. Harry S. Truman
16. The Bachelor President	p. George Washington
17. The Haberdasher	q. Woodrow Wilson

Answers to presidential nicknames:
1-h, 2-f, 3-p, 4-g, 5-c, 6-i, 7-b, 8-e, 9-d, 10-n, 11-j, 12-k, 13-q, 14-1, 15-m, 16-a, 17-o