What's In A Word

Someone asked, "How are you?" and the person replied, "I am good." Strange. Good has expanded its meaning from an action, moral state of good or bad, to now a feeling of how you are. You don't so much do good actions, as you feel good. The neighborhood of feelings: happy, sad, joyous, jealous, has added good to its list. It seems strangely out of place but there it is. So what?

Well, I began to think about the word, "God." It is a name of a deity, the deity, but it also gets used as a feeling of surprise, as in, "Oh my God!" We don't say, "Oh my surprise." I do it myself. But then what happens when I mean to use the word "God" to refer to my Lord, the Divine Lover. I think the name God gets diminished or loses its specialness if I am more often using the same word to mean something else, a feeling of surprise. What happens when you decide to use the word "good" to refer to an action you did or the state of your moral character. You say, "I am good," and people think you mean a feeling. The word God will lose meaning and specialness if I use it for other purposes. I would be upset if people said, "Oh my Terry," when they mean surprise or their tummy aches. I want my name to refer to me and other Terrys in the world. I wonder how God feels about me using God's name for things unrelated to God? I don't want to find out too late! Maybe I will just begin to say, "Oh my goodness!" Well, there's that word "good" again. What to do?