Doing silly things with language transcends time. Today we say smol and chonky, while in 1830s NYC there was a thing around misspelled abbreviations, like K.Y. for “no use” (know yuse) and N.C. for “enough said” (nuff ced). One that got popularized in 1839 was O.K. for “all correct” (oll korrect), which gradually rose to national prominence through use in a presidential campaign and the need for a quick way to write “looks good” on the gradually increasing volume of paperwork.

In 1929 - ninety years later! - the alternative spelling okay began displacing the original initialism. Quite some time after that, okay was such a common word that it got abbreviated again to k in text messages.