meh! (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Ben Zimmer]

My Language Log post "Three scenes in the life of 'meh'" (cited by
Arnold) gives plenty of historical background.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3806


On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 3:16 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>
> "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.
>>

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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