The OMG Phenomenon

Call me archaic, but I never use the expression OMG or Oh my god or other variations such as Oh my goodness when I get surprised or something. Not at all. One reason is that I don't believe in god or gods, but I never used OMG even back when I did believe in a god. The main reason is that three syllables is just too long! I'm more likely to utter single-syllable expressions such as wow or shit or damn or fuck.

Another reason is that it's annoying when it's said too many times. Have you ever sat beside someone or near someone in a bus or train who keeps saying Oh my god while reading the newspaper? Alright, I suppose saying it once is fine, but there are people who overuse and it's just totally annoying when they do. For example, someone would talk about, say, seeing Justin Bieber up close and personal, and they wouldn't finish telling their story without saying Oh my god a dozen times. And the person (or persons) they're talking to would react to every statement with another set of OMGs.

As a genuine expression of surprise, I suppose it's alright. And as long as someone says it only once, and doesn't say OMG over and over to indicate their speechlessness.

Let's go back to OMG having too many syllables. I really think it's just not practical as an expression of surprise, when you could always say wow, and that's just one syllable. Or great. Wicked also seems short enough and needs minimal tongue and lip movements. What if you're someone who's become used to saying OMG whenever you're surprised, and then you find that you're about to get run over by a truck? What if you only have half a second to move out of the way? My hypothesis is that OMGers are more likely to get run over than non-OMGers. And it follows that OMGers are going to be extinct in the next century or so. Of course, it will only make sense to conduct such a study and predict the extinction of OMGers if there is statistical evidence that OMG utterers do tend to freeze in their spot (while uttering OMG of course or any variation of it) when faced with imminent danger.

Another possibility is that non-OMGers are the ones in danger of extinction, if uttering OMG will prove to benefit mental processing, in the same way that speech fillers such as uhm aid a speaker's cognitive processing. The spread of OMG as an expression may be attributed to some sort of benefit anyway, though my suspicion is that it spread because it's easy to type. That's why Oh my god evolved into OMG, right? Oh my god is too long to type. People nowadays, at least in cities, do a lot more typing than speaking, and so they eagerly embraced OMG, and they carried it over to their offline language. And speech fillers mostly benefit mental processing in the sense that it helps one think of what to say next and/or how to say it. So I'm still more inclined to think that being an OMGer is disadvantageous when you're in the way of a runaway truck. And even if the use of OMG does decline as the century goes by, it would more sensible to attribute this not to OMGers getting run over by trucks, but to the rise to popularity of another expression that would take its place.