Funny you should say that. ISTM that without use on The Simpsons (see Lisa Simpson’s quote above), “meh” never gains a foothold in Internet jargon.
I say “eh.”, but in writing this is interpreted as the Canadian “eh?” I wouldn’t normally say “meh”, but it is less ambiguous.
Cetainly true in my case. In my family, the function of meh is served by “enh,” but that’s much harder to depic phonetically, so I started using Lisa Simpson’s meh when writing.
–Cliffy
Exactly. Like when a n00b on a message board picks “The New Guy” for his nym.
Cite?
It is an acronym that dates back to the telegraph, and was use as an in-joke between telegraph operators. When a telegraph operator received a smart assed message, he would often respond MEH, which was short for “My Ennui Heightens”, to indicated weariness and boredom with the tone of the sender’s message. Amazing how it persists to this day.
**“A” or *******: Yeh!
**“C” or *****: Meh.
**“F” or ***: Feh!
That’s very interesting. Legendary. Urban legendary, in fact. Or so it seems to me. Do you have a source for that?
For those that know French, I think it’s close to the French “bof” (with a circumflex on the “o”, IIRC), accompanied by the classic Gallic shoulder-shrug.
I agree, tdn…sounds very much like an urban legend origin.
Man, those jets are flyin’ low today!
Fear Itself We are wary of word origins that are claimed to be acronyms on here because of so many that are fake: “tip”, “fuck”, “posh”, … - see http://www.snopes.com/language/acronyms/acronyms.asp
Which is precisely the phenomenon he was parodying with his very funny post.
My goodness. The rare and desirable multi-user whoosh. I tip my hat to you, sir.
Me no get. Have we been mtjaflt’d?
Then you’ve been whooshed by a whoosh. A whoosh[sup]2[/sup], as it were.
Let’s try to keep higher math concepts out of this thread, mKay?
Hey, I got it. And damn funny it was, too: hats off, Fear Itself.
Actually meh is indeed sometimes used in German to render a sheep’s bleat.
I wish Amy Wong’s “buh” / “guh” would take off.
Actually, “bof” doesn’t take a circumflex accent on the ‘o’. And yes, this and “meh” pretty much mean the same thing. Actually, when I say one of these words, I pretty much shrug without thinking about it.