While new words are often devoted to emotional extremes, there’s a special place in many hearts for the supremely useful three letters of the exclamation “meh,” which express an almost infinitely flexible contemporary species of anticlimax or indifference.
This flexibility is embodied in the uses to which “meh” can be put. In its basic exclamatory form—most often found during online chat, emails, or other digital communications—it communicates something along the lines of “okay, whatever, it doesn’t bother me (but you should consider me determinedly unimpressed by the whole affair).”
As an adjective, it takes on a more ineffable flavor: “it was all very meh.” It can also be modified to convey the same sense for something more concrete, as in “the meh-ness of last night’s dinner.” You can even use it as a noun, if you feel the need: “I stand by my meh: the evening was forgettable.”
Some authorities note that “meh” advanced in popular culture thanks to the patronage of US cartoon series The Simpsons, where it seems to have featured for the first time in 1995 as a generic uninterested retort118—a kind of low-energy parallel to Homer Simpson’s iconic cry of frustration, “D’oh!”
In the pre-Simpsons era, one theory is that meh originated from the Yiddish term mnyeh, an exclamation with a similarly disdainful meaning.119 It’s thanks to the dominance of online typing and text messages, though, that meh has really come into its own as an all-purpose, one-word response. The verbal version of a nonplussed shrug, it today boasts close to a hundred million Google hits to its name, not to mention a place in the Collins English Dictionary.120
As the British author and critic Sam Leith neatly observed in a 2008 column for the Daily Telegraph, reflecting on the word’s ascent toward canonical status, meh “denotes mild boredom rather than the extreme form. That subtlety of meaning is its value. I can’t think of an equivalent.”121 In this, it’s a perfect emblem of the variations of register so important to online discourse, where typed language must match all the emotions necessary for casual conversation—and all the fine gradations of indifference.