Courtesy of Twitter

This was retweeted by one I follow, but I think it deserves wider circulation, because this is the kind of thing I think it just kind of funny and wonderful: What is likely the first recorded usage of OMG.

1917. The end of WWI. Winston Churchill (my "cousin Winnie," as I've alluded before) first rising to prominence. Only five years shy of being 100 years ago.

As the person who writes that blog notes, the person who used it doesn't look like a tweener girl. And the phrase is used CONSIDERABLY differently than how you hear it in the average mall these days.

(Of course, I am quite guilty of using the word "awesome" in its tweener-girl debased usage far more often than I use it in its original and more appropriate usage. And I know a few people who are extremely annoyed by that.)

I wonder if that usage of OMG is somewhat similar to the Victorian publishing convention (which I admit I have affected here on occasion) of having a character say something like "I'll be d.....d if..."

(I admit these days I'm more prone to say "OMB" which is short for Oh My Bob, which was proposed on Ravelry as a non-Deity-slandering version of the same. And I think I've occasionally said jokingly "Oh My Celestia," riffing on the idea that Celestia is sort of a goddess-princess in the Pony realm. And Anpan and Nemu of Nemu-Nemu use OMP, for Oh My Pizza)

It just strikes me as interesting that I live in an era when I can turn on the television and hear the s-word (and sometimes even the f-word or the n-word) but I can also pull a book off my shelf and have "damn" replaced mostly with an ellipsis.

***

I guess I'm mostly over my upset of the previous days. I can tell because I can now laugh about some of the things that so offended me. After I got done this morning and was heading home for lunch, I got to thinking about what I had on hand. And I realized I had some beef and some wheat bread. So I said to myself, as I got in the car, "It's time for a sandwich!" and then IMMEDIATELY cracked up, because I heard "it's time for a sandwich!" (in its full annoying-to-an-academician-who-hates-corporate-speak meaning) about forty-five times over the past three days. (That's not as much of an exaggeration as you might think.)

I may even suggest to my chair that one of our departmental lunches this fall be a "make your own SANDWICH" lunch and see if I can get a laugh out of her. (She thinks the idea of "sandwiching your criticism" is as poor a fit for how our department works as I do.)