Burying the Lede

I had always thought that the term "A-OK" was a NASA thing. I found a little support for this, in the following from NASA's history:

"The origin of the popular space term "A.OK" is a matter of widespread public interest. In reporting the Freedom 7 flight, the press attributed the term to Astronaut Shepard, and indeed NASA News Release 1-61-99, May 5, 1961, has Shepard report "A.OK" shortly after impact. A replay of the flight voice communications tape disclosed that Shepard himself did not use the term. It was Col. John A. "Shorty" Powers who reported Shepard's condition as "A.OK" in a description of the flight. Tecwyn Roberts of STG and Capt. Henry E. Clements of the Air Force had used "A.OK" frequently in reports written more than four months before the Shepard flight. Roberts attributed coinage of the term to Paul Lein, of the Western Electric Co., while the tracking network was being constructed. Lein, however, said that "A.OK" was a communal development among communications engineers while circuits were first being established downrange from Cape Canaveral. The voice circuits at first gave poor quality. The bands were narrow, and the systems operated on 1,500 cycles. There was much static and background noise. Words got lost in voice circuit systems checks. To make transmissions clearer, the communicators started using "A.OK" because the letter "A" has a brilliant sound. Other sources claim that oldtime railroad telegraphers used "A-OK" as one of several terms to report the status of their equipment. Be that as it may, Powers, "the voice of Mercury Control," by his public use of "A.OK," made those three letters a universal symbol meaning "in perfect working order." "

But Wikipedia makes no mention of this history, and for them (it?) it's just the verbal version of the well-known hand gesture. Among different cultures, the gesture has, uh, widely varying meaning. Suffice it that after reading the Wikipedia piece, outside the USA I wouldn't use it.

This is a long way round to the results of my latest PET scan, about 15 months after this Big C Odyssey began. From my radiation oncologist's nurse: "A-OK. No evidence of disease."

As I said once before, quoting from Die Hard, and this time with feeling: yippie ki-yay, motherfucker.