“Meh” Becomes a Word
A bit of shameless re-blogging to get me back into the swing of things:
Collins English Dictionary is adding an entry for meh (“an interjection to suggest indifference or boredom”) to next year’s 30th anniversary edition. It was the winner of a campaign launched by Collins seeking public nominations for new words, and it beat out such competition as jargonaut (a fan of jargon), frenemy (an enemy disguised as a friend) and huggles (a hybrid of hugs and snuggles). This follows on the heels of another Collins competition that we discussed last month, where the public was invited to vote for which old, infrequently used words should be saved from deletion.
[Ben Zimmer via Ideas]
Apparently this announcement has caused a certain amount of support and disapproval from the blogosphere, centered around whether onomatopoeias and interjections are worthy of inclusion in dictionaries.
Zimmer, the linguist who wrote the column I linked to above, also describes a bit of the surprising etymology behind “meh”:
An additional problem with meh is that it still feels like a bit of a novelty, since it owes much of its current popularity to online discourse. But meh has a fascinating story to tell. As I learned when I researched the word for a 2006 Language Log post, the onomatopoetic roots of meh, along with its slightly more disapproving sibling feh, go back to Yiddish.
The word was then popularized of the Simpsons and spread “as an all-purpose lukewarm reaction in online communication, particularly in fan forums, chatrooms, and the like.” Now it’s even made its way onto American Idol in noun form as “meh-ness.”
Thank goodness. Meh is probably one of my favorite words, and I fully support the idea of dictionaries tracking innovations in the use of language — even if it’s through transparent publicity stunts. Now I was going to write a little bit on the purpose of dictionaries, but meh, maybe I’ll save that for another day…