Politics What Did Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Mean by 'ILYTG'? Behind the Secret Acronym They Used Since the '40s Long before the use of "LOL" and "#TBT," the former president used a private acronym to send love notes By Sandra Sobieraj Westfall Sandra Sobieraj Westfall Sandra Sobieraj Westfall is a former national political correspondent, digital writer and editor at large at PEOPLE. She left PEOPLE in 2023. People Editorial Guidelines Updated on November 20, 2023 08:07AM EST Photo: Martin Schoeller When Jimmy Carter was in the White House, the hashtag was still a lowly pound sign, and social media was decades away. But the former president, now 99, proved he was a man ahead of his time when, as a smitten young Naval officer in the 1940s, he coined the acronym "ILYTG." "'I love you the goodest.' That's what my mother and daddy used to say back and forth, and I picked it up with Rosa," the nation's 39th president told PEOPLE in 2014, in a joint interview with his wife of several decades, Rosalynn Carter, who died on Nov. 19 at the age of 96. Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter's Relationship Timeline The couple attributed their longevity to giving each other space, as well as their shared passion for service: Into their 90s, they traveled around the globe — to build houses in Nepal, or to fight river blindness in South Sudan — with the Carter Center. The monogram is inscribed on a compact he once gave his bride, the future first lady, that today is on display at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta. "Now all our children do the same thing – ILYTG on the phone or in emails. They generally just put the initials," President Carter said. "And sometimes they change the initials and make you guess what they're talking about."