meh-ness

[Jonathan Lighter]

Twenty-odd years ago I had a student (not born till ca.1965)  who sometimes used the term "goon child" to refer to moronic individuals.

  So you never can tell....

  JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: meh-ness
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Once again, you are most likely correct, sir. A friend told me that
she had dumped her boyfriend. The reason: when asked his opinion of
the family seder to which he had been invited, he replied, "Feh!" She
was so angry that I feared that merely recounting the tale was going
to cause her to burst into tears.

Before that moment, I had been completely unaware of the existence of
the term and its use. After "Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad" became
"Mad Magazine," I pretty much stopped reading it. Nothing in Mad ever
reached the level of comedy and horror intermixed that I found in the
classic Tales tale, "Goon Child."

-Wilson

On 6/8/06, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Jonathan Lighter
> Subject: Re: meh-ness
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _Mad_ magazine used to use "feh," which expressed, I believe, slightly greater disapproval.
>
> JL
>
> Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Jesse Sheidlower
> Subject: Re: meh-ness
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 02:33:41PM -0400, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
> > A Language Log post of potential interest to ADS-Lers:
> >
> > "Meh-ness to society"
> > http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003238.html
> >
> > Comments welcome.
>
> My comment is that I was struck with the timeliness of it, as
> in the last few weeks I've noticed it appearing with great
> frequency in a few online fora I read. This is likely some
> artifact (i.e. that I never noticed it before but it's been
> there all along), but my immediate reaction was "Why is it
> always that within seconds of some meme reaching my brain I
> discover that Ben's already written about it?"
>
> Jesse Sheidlower
> OED
>
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