Phrase discovered in a letter penned to Winston Churchill in 1917 by the British Admiral Lord Fisher.

By Emily Allen

THE DAILY MAIL, 7 August 2012—It’s one of the most common phrases of the modern technological age coined by celebrities like Paris Hilton and used by teenage girls across Britain and America.

However, it seems O.M.G. is actually very ‘last century’.

It has emerged that the British admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher first penned the acronym in a letter to Winston Churchill as far back as 1917.

Lord ‘Jacky’ Fisher, as he was known, used it in a letter to the famous wartime prime minister about some ‘utterly [upsetting]’ World War I newspaper headlines.

He wrote: ‘I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis — O.M.G (Oh! My! God!)— Shower it on the Admiralty!!’

The phrase, added to the Oxford English Dictionary last year, is the colloquial abbreviation for ‘Oh My God’, generally used in conversations to express surprise, embarrassment, excitement and disgust, according to the Urban Dictionary.

It’s normally associated with teenage girls and the phrase was thought to have originated from online chat rooms, most commonly used in online games, web chats and in text messages.

It is frequently heard on reality TV shows too, including The Only Way is Essex.

It’s a far cry from the upper-class world of Lord Fisher who was one of the most celebrated officers in the history of the Royal Navy.

Lord Fisher began his career during the Crimean War and ended it during the First World War.

He is widely credited for materially preparing the fleet for war, introducing the world’s first all-big-gun battleship Dreadnought.

However, he resigned as First Sea Lord in 1915 after falling out with the then First Lord Winston Churchill over the commitment to the Dardanelles expedition.

However, O.M.G is not the first modern day phrase which seems to have surprising historic routes.

LOL, now defined as ‘laughing out loud’, was first used in 1960 to denote ‘little old lady’.



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