“For instance, a lot of kids online spell “cool,” “k-e-w-l,” says McKean, senior editor for U.S. dictionaries at Oxford Press. “They know how to spell cool, but it just looks cooler to spell it “k-e-w-l.”
It was cool in certain East Coast cities in the mid-19th century to substitute OK for “all correct.” McKean says it was common for people of that day to use inside lingo — shorthand full of puns, purposeful misspellings and abbreviations. For example, they’d use “SP” for “small potatoes,” or “TBFTB” for “too big for their britches.”
