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  • 2019-11-14 (xsd:date)
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  • Was the First Known Use of 'OMG' Written in a Letter to Churchill? (en)
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  • No, smart phone-wielding teenagers were not the first to use the phrase OMG as an abbreviation for Oh my God. Try a British Royal Navy man — more than 100 years ago. That's right, OMG was first employed by a retired English naval admiral in a letter to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was famous for his soaring oratories while leading England to victory in World War II. The letter can be found in a book, authored by John Arbuthnot Fisher, better known as Lord Fisher. In an interview with National Public Radio on the 100th anniversary of the letter (Sept. 9, 2017), linguist Ben Zimmer discussed Lord Fisher in explaining the original use of OMG: In a piece penned for the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 8, 2017, Zimmer said researchers for the Oxford English Dictionary were the first to make the discovery of OMG's surprisingly long history: In fact, the page in Lord Fisher's book, Memories, that contains the letter is archived online. Zimmer said that although the first instance of OMG was written by Fisher in 1917, the phrase didn't catch on until the mid-1990s, associated with digital communications like chat rooms, text-messaging and social media. Nevertheless, Zimmer concluded, we can thank cranky old Lord Fisher for showing us that concocting playful new abbreviations is a time-honored tradition and hardly the death knell of English. (en)
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