OMG – short for “Oh My God” - is something we see everywhere in our modern world; we see it in emails, on social media, whenever we talk to people on WhatsApp, Telegram or other forms of communication such as SMSes.
It has become ingrained in the fabric of our daily life and fits our modern world so well that it has to be a phrase of the electronic age.
However, it has also been claimed that the first use of “OMG” was in fact in a letter written to Winston Churchill (pic) in 1917. Is there any truth to this?
VERDICT:
TRUE
This might evoke a surprised “OMG” for some, but the first use of these three letters as we know it was in a letter penned by John Arbuthnot Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher to Churchill, who was the United Kingdom's Munitions Minister at the time.
Fisher – who was a retired Admiral of the Fleet of the UK's Royal Navy at the time – had used in a short letter to Churchill to share his opinion about the Navy's strategy against Germany during World War 1, which was raging at the time.
Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal's language columnist Benjamin Zimmer said when interviewed by the US National Public Radio on the 100th anniversary of “OMG” in 2017, Fisher was actually using the phrase in a sarcastic way to end his letter.
“At the end of his letter, he (Fisher) said that he heard a new order of knighthood is on the tapis, which means on the table and he said 'OMG, oh, my God, shower it on the Admiralty'. So he kind of invented it on the spot for that letter,” said Zimmer.
So there you have it, “OMG” is older than email – it is as old as snail mail.
SOURCES:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/omg-winston-churchill/
https://www.npr.org/2017/09/09/549802497/omg-turns-100
https://archive.org/details/memoriesbyadmira00fishuoft/page/77/mode/1up?view=theater
