Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Pop versus soda, again? Meh.

Way back in 2006 I wrote about the geography (complete with maps) of pop-versus-soda and rilly-versus-reely. Lately I've been thinking about "meh". It's not in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but maybe someday:
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."
There's more than just meh though: Slate.com's Ben Yagoda writes about (complete with audio and video examples) "The Internet and the rise of awwa, meh, feh, and heh." Fascinating.