Meh - the word that's sweeping the internet

How was my weekend? Meh. The mehness of it is indescribable. Just one big, fat meh. If you are an old-media kind of reader, "meh" won't mean a whole lot to you. The word has appeared in the national press three times in the past year. If you gain new vocabulary from conversation, it is probably unfamiliar. If you can't be torn from the web, however, you will almost certainly know it, and its meaning.

Meh means rubbish. It means boring. It means not worth the effort, who cares, so-so, whatever. It is the all-purpose dismissive shrug of the blogger and messageboarder. And it is ubiquitous. On the I Love Music messageboard, for example, 4,010 separate discussion threads feature the use of "meh".

No one is quite sure where it comes from. Graeme Diamond, principal editor of the new word group at the Oxford English Dictionary, says it's not yet suitable for the OED, but he does have a "meh" file, and the first recorded print usage occurred in the Edmonton Sun newspaper in Canada in 2003: "Ryan Opray got voted off Survivor. Meh."

He thinks, however, it sprang into common usage from the Simpsons.

I can enlighten him further. Some credit the 2001 episode Hungry Hungry Homer with the first use of "meh" as a dismissal, when Homer asks Lisa and Bart if they want to go to the Blockoland theme park and receives the answer, "meh". But the Language Log website notes a 1995 episode in which Bart dismisses Marge's discussion of weaving with a "meh".

Some amateur etymologists on the web reckon meh is derived from Yiddish, pointing to a 1936 song that uses it as the sound of a goat bleating. A poster on Artblog.net called it a "Yiddish interjection used to express disdain that borders on apathy", but did not source it. "Many North American English interjections do have some basis in Yiddish," accepts Diamond. But does this one? "I can't say."

In any case, the word needs to pass into "widespread unselfconscious usage" before it will feature in the OED, he says. And with a print lifespan of just four years, so far, that is some distance away. But does he think it's becoming more common? "Well, I had fishcakes at lunchtime and I told someone they were ... meh."