Oh my God!" We have all heard this Valley Girl phrase take a one-and-a-half gainer from the lips of excited females (and a few males). It seems to be the phrase this summer, stealing a march on such stable slang as mega, awesome, wicked (often paired with awesome), to the max, totally, and excellent. It appears, at least for the summer of 1983, to be the catch-phrase par excellence, the primum inter pares of ejaculations.
But what exactly does the phrase catch? It appears to be attached to excitement or surprise, or at least it helps simulate excitement and surprise. The words can come anywhere in the sentence, being no respecter of grammar, and can be used as a coin to pay for any emotion, from disappointment with the eggs at brunch to the failure of a test. It is a fairly indiscriminate groups of sounds, ready to hire out its emotional guns to anyone and everyone.
But what is even more interesting is what the phrase is not. No one uses it as an appeal to God, as it might be used in the beginning of a prayer, since most people, even if they believe in a god, don't ask him for much anymore; it's easier to get things through MasterCard or Visa. It also has the vice of its virtue. One might as well burp excitedly or string nonsense syllables together, since the effect would be the same. An intricate question now bubbles to the surface: Why would people use a phrase that has no meaning to it to express feelings about situations that supposedly have some importance to them, no matter how small or brief? Doesn't this sound, after all, well, a bit crazy?
No, not crazy, but certainly unthinking. Donna Cross, in an essay called "Catchwords," makes the observation that "catch phrases have been used so much and so loosely that they have become a kind of substitute for thinking -- an automatic response void of content or meaning." When a group of girls outside my dorm squeal "Oh my God!" because someone got a package of chocolate chip cookies from home, and then I happen to overhear later someone whisperingly say those magic words as she relates how she broke up with some guy she really liked, some sensitivity to and flexibility of the language has been lost. Instead, it is language by numbers, full of insertions that appear to carry meaningful information but which really only indicate that one has banded to the group one is talking to, a kind of insider's lingo. Catch-phrases catch fashionable conformity.
I think even more can be gleaned from this phrase. Why is this phrase primarily the property of girls? Boys on campus rarely ever say it, and if they do, it is not with the squeal and vibrato that girls use. The phrase seems to reinforce a stereotype about females that the girls on campus do not seem especially anxious to get rid of, namely, a heedless, unpurposed, impulsive creature with no more than a catch-phrase and helpless demeanor to her credit. To the extent that this observation carries weight, then the girls are only damaging themselves, not only in the eyes of those around them, but in their own eyes as well since they are building up habits that are extremely difficult to dislodge.
I am not saying that girls should be like guys, since guys have their own set of social expectations to live down to, and don't have life any easier. Both guys and girls have to realize that the world is full of users of language out to manipulate people out of their money and their dignity. Unless people understand how they fool themselves with their own unthinking use of language, the shysters will have a field day. That self-protection beings with the policing of one's own language and the eradication of everything that is thoughtless and stereotyped. That, after all, is what education is about, to be aware of how aware the self needs to be.