meh! (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Victor Steinbok]

"Feh!" is a classic Yiddish (or, perhaps, universal) interjection,
occasionally extending to a diphthong (also, "fooh!", "fooy!" and
"fooyah!"--although the latter is more Israeli than Yiddish; the other
two also exist in Slavic languages--"meh" and "feh", as such, do not;
"fooh" and "fooy" have multiple uses in Russian). My bare suspicion is
that "meh" follows the same path, although I have neither specific
recollections no sources to place it. There certainly has been a spike
in print and TV use in the last two years, but that does not mean that
it's a recent coinage. There is also a possibly new meaning, implying
something uninteresting, bland, so-so, or suggesting that the speaker
simply doesn't care. So "feh" is not merely stronger--it expresses
nearly the opposite emotion, mostly of revulsion (although, I'm sure,
milder uses exist as well).

     VS-)

On 7/6/2012 1:59 PM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
> On Jul 6, 2012, at 10:05 AM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC wrote:
>> I think of "meh" as much older than the cites below.  I wouldn't be
>> surprised to find it in Mad Magazine (or even the comics version) from
>> the Harvey Kurtzman days.
> the links i gave were to references *about* _meh_, not to uses of it.  from Ben Zimmer's most recent LLog posting:
>
>    I spent a fair bit of time skimming through early issues of Mad in a digital archive and found only the stronger interjection feh rather than meh, mneh, or mnyeh.
>
> arnold

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