‘OMG’ was first used in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1917. A retired British admiral of the Royal Navy one day became excited due to headlines regarding the mobilising forces of Britain. Excited to share this news with a college, the admiral quickly wrote a small acronym for ‘Oh My God!’ in his letter. Little did he know that he had just invented one of the most popular acronyms in today’s society.
100 Mind-Blowing Winston Facts
Two significant car crashes. On 13 December 1931, Winston Churchill was struck by a car while crossing Fifth Ave in New York City. He had looked the wrong way before crossing the street and was dragged for several yards, sustaining bruises, sprains and cuts. In the same year, a 19-year-old British aristocrat named John Scott-Ellis was driving a red Fiat in Munich and almost hit the future Führer, Adolf Hitler. Scott-Ellis jumped out of his car and apologised, and Hitler only suffered minor bruises. They shook hands, and Scott-Ellis later remarked, ‘For a few seconds, perhaps, I held the history of Europe in my rather clumsy hands. . . [Hitler] was only shaken up, but had I killed him, it would have changed the history of the world.’
The Churchill myth. Of Winston Churchill’s most famous 1940 speeches: ‘Blood, toil, tears and Sweat,’ ‘Fight Them on the beaches’, ‘Finest Hour,’ and ‘The Few,’ only one, ‘Finest Hour’ was broadcast on the radio at the time. All of them were delivered to the House of Commons, but only after his ‘Finest Hour’ speech did Churchill record a version later for the BBC. The other speeches he only recorded in 1949.