The older crowd likes to blame the youth for the popularization of text-speak. You know the type: LOL, LMFAO, ROFL, OMG, Totes. Well, it turns out that we're blaming the wrong people for at least one of those abominations to the English language. "OMG" is almost 100 years old.

The earliest known usage of the abbreviation OMG was found in a letter to Winston Churchill. The 1917 correspondance pictured above is from John Arbuthnot Fisher. The sentence in question reads:

"I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis — O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) — Shower it on the Admiralty!!" [sic]

The letter was published in Fisher's Memories in 1919. Fisher, who was a British Admiral, is largely remembered as the driving force behind the creation of advanced capital ship, the HMS Dreadnought. It seemed revolutionary at the time, but actually ended up (temporarily) destroying Britain's long-standing lead in naval power.

He was also famous for abandoning his posts at the drop of a hat. He resigned from his job as head of the Navy in a letter to Churchill that simply read, "I am unable to remain any longer your colleague ... I am off to Scotland at once so as to avoid all questionings."

There's no doubt that since the time the letter was written, simple abbreviation has taken on an entirely new life of its own. Added to the Oxford English Dictionary last year, OMG is only one in a line of abbreviations that have become prevalent in everyday speech. Naysayers will even tell you those three letters are going to be (or already have been) the downfall of the English language.

But that's not the issue we're tackling right now. Our question here has more to do with what brought Fisher, of stately British naval origin — and, according to the above picture, quite the sourpuss — to inadvertently become the first-ever remembered person to use this phrase. Was it simply an attempt to save time as he ran away to places like Scotland? Or did he predict that tweens the world over would champion his phrase and shout it from the rooftops their texting fingers?

This article originally published at The Mary Sue here