Throughout his extraordinary life, Winston Churchill experienced numerous “OMG” experiences, such as surviving the catastrophic Gallipoli campaign in World War I and serving as prime minister of Britain during World War II. Churchill was present for numerous events that would go down in history, including the little-known beginnings of the term “OMG.”
In the 1990s, the abbreviation “OMG,” which stands for “oh my god,” gained popularity as early internet slang. However, a letter to Churchill in 1917—when he was the British navy’s first lord of the admiralty—is where the term was first known to be used. John Arbuthnot Fisher, the navy’s highest ranked officer and the author of the letter, frequently disagreed with Churchill. “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis [table] — O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) —” Fisher wrote in the 1917 message. Douse the Admiralty with it! Unfortunately for the linguistically astute Fisher, his witty comment was not picked up by Churchill, the navy, or the British public. Not until the advent of the internet era, which occurred almost 70 years later, did the acronym “OMG” become extremely well-known.
