Exclamation or Expletive, OMG Is Omnipresent

¿ Defensive tackle Warren Sapp said this about legendary NFL quarterback Brett Favre: "Oh my God. I want to know what he's drinking and eating."

¿ Charles Gibson said "Oh my God" while questioning Hillary Clinton.

On Yahoo, there's a spirited debate about the name of the new OMG service on one of the message boards. A user writes: "This is taking the Lord's name in vain, and while I'm fairly certain you could care less about that, I can no longer support Yahoo if they insist on keeping this OMG product. It shows the height of insensitivity to people of faith."

To which another user replies: "Lighten up, it's just an instant messaging phrase. If you find that kind of thing offensive, you should unplug your ethernet cable right now and stay off the internet."

And then someone makes the point: "There is no doubt what the OMG stands for. Every Christian should be outraged that the name of the Lord is used with such disrespect. The point is that people use his name as an insignificant figure of speech."

Officially, Yahoo avoids the conflict altogether. "The name 'OMG' is derived from IM speak and means 'wow!' " says company spokesman Carrie Davis.

Stanley Hauerwas, a religion professor at Duke Divinity School, takes a different slant. He has been known to liberally salt his everyday speech with profanities. Lingua Franca magazine once called him "a foul-mouthed theologian." He says that when he hears people say, "Oh my God," "it's a cry not of profanity or vulgarity. It usually has the grammar of a lament. You'd have to outlaw the Psalms if you wanted to do away with laments."

Timothy Jay, author of "Cursing in America" and "Why We Curse," says that according to his research, " 'Oh my God' is in the top 10 of expletives. It is used five times as much by women as by men." Oddly enough, Jay says, research has also shown that "Oh my God" is often a euphemism for something else.

Hauerwas agrees: "Instead of 'Oh my God,' I prefer 'Oh [excrement].' "

In fact, our culture is more tolerant of profanities than obscenities. The Federal Communications Commission, for example, draws distinctions between profane language -- traditionally defined as irreverence toward God -- and obscene material -- defined by the FCC as material that describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way. Most profanities and vulgarities are allowed on the air at certain times of day, but obscenities are not.

In many societies throughout history, it has been taboo to speak the name of God. In Christendom, euphemisms -- like "zounds" (God's wounds), "golly" (God's body) and "gosh" -- evolved. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "gosh" as a "mincing pronunciation of God."