Putting this in IMHO and googling it seems to come up with a number of different interpretations of its meaning in English. Literally it means “like this, like that” in French, but as to the contextual meaning answers vary from being akin to “It’s all good” to “meh”, to just a step above tolerable.
Interesting to see the differences. Appearantly I’m not the only one that sees it as ‘you win some, you lose some’, but that is still quite different from the majority of ‘meh’.
Someone once pointed out that the equivalent terms in other languages is usually a reduplicative:
comme ci, comme ca (French)
asi asi (Spanish)
sa som sa (Danish)
etsky ketsky (greek)
zozo (Dutch)
svo-svo (Icelandic)
sa sa (Swedish)
asim-asim (Portuguese)
zozo (Afrikaans)
ma made (Japanese)
mamahuhu (Chinese)
To me, ‘it’s going’ is much more negative. That’s like saying, ‘the only good thing I can say about today is that I’m not dead’. ‘Comme ci, comme ca’ is more like, ‘oh, can’t complain’, or, ‘not too bad, not too bad’. Not fantastic, but not bad, either.