meh

Cartoon characters Lisa and Bart Simpson sitting on a couch and saying, “meh”

Lisa and Bart Simpson saying “meh” in The Simpsons 2001 episode “Hungry Hungry Homer”

3 February 2025

Meh is an interjection expressing apathy or uninterest. We don’t know exactly when people began using it, nor where it comes from. Two explanations are commonly proffered. The first is that it is simply a transcription of an inarticulate, oral grunt or sigh. The second is that it comes from the Yiddish מע (me), which can be an interjection with the senses of “so-so” and “be it as it may.”

The interjection mneh appears in W.H. Auden’s 1969 poem Moon Landing, expressing his apathy over watching the historical event on television:

Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
     and was not charmed: give me a watered
     lively garden, remote from blatherers

It is possible that Auden was picking up on the Yiddish usage. While he was not Jewish, he was living in New York in 1969 and may have heard the interjection and incorporated it into his vocabulary.

The meh transcription appears by 1992, when it is recorded in a Usenet discussion about the television program Melrose Place:

>>So is the TH cute?

>YES!!

Meh... far too Ken-doll for me…

(TH stands for token homosexual.)

But it would be the repeated use of the interjection on the animated television show The Simpsons that would catapult meh into the mainstream. It was first used on that show in October 1994 in the episode “Sideshow Bob Roberts,” in which Lisa is investigating possible voter fraud at the Springfield library:

Librarian: Here you go … the results of last month’s mayor election, all 48,000 voters and who each one of them voted for.

Lisa: I thought this was a secret ballot.

Librarian: Meh.

(Not relevant to the history of meh, but just before this exchange Lisa utters this prescient line, “I can’t believe a convicted felon would get so many votes.”)

But the exchange that really cemented meh in the public consciousness was this one from the March 2001 episode “Hungry Hungry Homer”:

Homer (after watching Blockoland commercial): Kids … how would you … like to go … to … Blockoland?

Bart & Lisa (in unison): Meh.

Homer: But the TV gave me the impression that…

Bart: We said meh.

Lisa: M-E-H. Meh.

The long association of Yiddish with comedy could be the inspiration for the Simpsons writers using the term. But we can’t say with absolute confidence that the interjection as we know it comes from the Yiddish.

Meh can also be used as an adjective. This usage dates to at least 2007, when the following appears in a 27 January 2007 review of the television show 24:

Let's be frank here: 24 has lost its mind. The hinges were always loose, but this sixth series is something else. It opened last week with Jack mute, scarred and bearded following months of torture in a secret Chinese prison. The man could scarcely walk. Two hours later he was cheerfully high-kicking a suicide bomber out the back of a train.

Nuts. But somehow it all seemed, to use a bit of internet parlance, a bit “meh.”

Sources:

Auden, W.H. “Moon Landing.” The New Yorker, 6 September 1969, 38/2.  

Bierma, Nathan. “‘Meh’ Joins Ranks of Little Words that Do Grunt Work.” Chicago Tribune, 13 April 2007, D2/1-2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Brooker, Charlie. “The Guide: Charlie Brookers Screen Burn.” The Guardian (London), 27 January 2007, 52. ProQuest Newspapers.

Dorrance, John. “Yes, I Actually Watched Melrose Place.” Usenet: soc.motss, 10 July 1992. Google Groups.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. meh, adj.

Groening, Matt, James L. Brooks, and Sam Simon. “Hungry Hungry Homer.” The Simpsons, episode 12.15, 4 March 2001.

———. “Sideshow Bob Roberts.” The Simpsons, episode 6.5, 9 October 1994.

Harkavy, Alexander. Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary, fourth edition. New York: Hebrew Publishing, 1928, 307/1, s.v. מע. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Meh.” Languagehat.com, 13 April 2007.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2015, s.v. meh, int. & adj.

Yagoda, Ben. “Pardon the Interjection.” Slate.com, 16 February 2007.

Zimmer, Ben. “Meh-ness to Society.” Language Log, 8 June 2006.

———. “Three Scenes in the Life of ‘meh.’” Language Log, 26 February 2012.

Image credit: Gracie Films and 20th Century Fox Television, 2001. Fair use of a single still frame from a television program to illustrate the topic under discussion.

seaborgium

B&W photo of a man in a suit standing behind a lab bench with chemical equipment. A periodic table hangs on the wall behind.

Glenn T. Seaborg in 1950

31 January 2025

Seaborgium is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 106 and the symbol Sg. Its most stable isotopes have half lives of only a few minutes, and it has no applications other than pure research. The element is named after chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, who not only led the discovery of this element, but was instrumental in the discovery of several transuranic elements, most notably plutonium. Despite Seaborg’s contributions to nuclear chemistry, the naming was controversial. Not only was credit for the 1974 discovery of 106 embroiled in a dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union, but this was the first element to be named after a living person, and many thought that inappropriate.

But element 106 is not the first to be dubbed seaborgium. Several other transuranic elements (99, 100, and 105) have been unofficially named after Seaborg.

Seaborg’s name was floated as a potential element name as early as 1953. A September 1953 article in the journal Names noted that his name was being considered for the next element to be discovered:

Apparently more elements will be produced by the irradiative techniques of the cyclotron; elements no. 99 to no. 103 have already been predicted. The name seaborgium has already been suggested for the next discovered element, in recognition of Seaborg's achievements.

And a few months later, seaborgium was proposed as the name for element 99 (now known as einsteinium). From Newsweek of 15 February 1954:

Seaborg participated in the discovery of five previous man-made elements and is credited with a guiding role in the finding of No. 99. To the discoverers, who have the privilege of naming the new element, one name has already been suggested: seaborgium.

Element 106 was first created in 1971 by a team led by Albert Ghiorso at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but they did not recognize the significance at the time. In 1974, a Soviet team lead by Yuri Oganessian announced they had synthesized element 106 at their facility in Dubna, Russia. Following this announcement, a team at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Seaborg and that included Ghiorso, repeated the 1971 experiment and found their data was in accord with the earlier data, showing that 106 had been synthesized in 1971.

The dispute over primacy of discovery raged on until 1992, when a joint working group of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) concluded that the evidence for the Soviet team’s discovery was insufficient, and credit should go to the Berkeley team. But the controversy over the element’s name did not end.

In 1994, the Berkeley team announced their preference for 106’s name was seaborgium. As reported by the San Francisco Examiner of 13 March 1994:

Element 106, which was created in a particle accelerator, has been named “seaborgium” after Dr. Glenn Seaborg, Nobel Prize winner and nuclear pioneer.

The announcement is to be made Sunday [13 March] by Seaborg’s associate Kenneth Hulet at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting in San Diego, a society spokesperson said.

Objections to the name were immediately raised again, this time over naming the element for a living person. As a result, IUPAC initially rejected the name. But that decision came under fire for disregarding the right of discoverers to name their discoveries, and in 1998 IUPAC officially recognized seaborgium as the name for element 106.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Davidson, Keay. “Element Named After Berkeley Scientist.” San Francisco Examiner, 13 March 1994, B-2/3–4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Ellis, Fred, Jr. “Naming of Chemical Elements.” Names, 1.3, September 1953, 163–76 at 172. American Name Society.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

“Names and Symbols of Transfermium Elements (IUPAC Recommendations 1997),” Chemistry International, 20.2, 1998, 37–38 at 38. IUPAC.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. seaborgium, n.

“Violent New Element.” Newsweek, 15 February 1954, 59/2. ProQuest Magazines.

Photo credit: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, 1950. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.

meat

Photo of various meats (beef, pork, chicken) on a table

29 January 2025

Vegetarians don’t eat meat, at least they don’t nowadays. But had there been vegetarians a millennium ago, they would have. For, you see, meat did not always mean the flesh of animals. In Old English, the word mete meant simply food. It comes from the Proto-Germanic root *mati-, relating to eating and food. From the Old English translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History:

Þa seo circe gehalgad wæs, & he mæssan gesungen hæfde, ða bæd se gesið hiene, ðæt he eode in his hus & mete þege.

(When the church had been consecrated & he had sung the mass, the man begged him that he go into his house and take meat).

Bede’s original Latin has “ieiunium soluere” (to break the fast).

It wasn’t until the Middle English period, specifically the mid-thirteenth century, that meat started to narrow in meaning to apply only to animal flesh. From a passage about the preparations for Passover from the poem The Story of Genesis and Exodus, lines 3150–53, written c. 1250, with an extant manuscript from before 1325:

Ilc man after his owen fond,
Heued and fet, and in rew mete,
lesen fro ðe bones and eten,
Wið wriðel and vn-lif bread.

(Each man after his own desire, [roast] the meat in bitter herbs, head and feet, pick from the bones and eat, with herbs and unleavened bread.)

Later on the meaning narrowed still further to exclude fish and poultry, and in some regions, it can mean the flesh of specific animals. For example in the southern United States meat is sometimes restricted to pork. And in Hawaii during the first half of the twentieth century meat referred just to beef; the Dictionary of American Regional English records a sign seen in a Honolulu shop window in the 1960s that read, “no meat today, only pork.”

And specific non-animal foods are still referred to as meat. The meat of a nut, for example, is the edible portion inside the shell.

But the Old English sense is not completely lost. Even today, the word is still occasionally used to mean food in general. And meat is often used in a metaphorical sense to mean sustenance, as in the phrase meat and drink. Shakespeare uses the phrase in As You Like It (5.1):

It is meat and drinke to me to see a clowne.

Fleshy meat, as the main dish of a meal, has given rise to a number of metaphorical phrases and sayings. Meat and potatoes, meaning a staple and unsophisticated offering, dates to at least 1846. And the use of meat to mean the main part or gist of a story or matter of importance comes along a couple of decades later.

In Old English meat could also be a verb, meaning to supply or furnish with food. That sense survives today in certain regional dialects, notably in the Appalachian Mountains in the southern United States. This verb sense, to meat, sounds like and is semantically similar to the Present-Day English verb to mete, meaning to dole out, to distribute; the two verbs come from different Germanic roots and are etymologically unrelated.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, eds. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 5.4, 462.

Bede. The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Part 1.2. Thomas Miller, ed. Early English Text Society O.S. 96. London: Oxford UP, 1896, 5.4, 394.

Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), vol. 3, 1996, s.v. meat, n., meat, v.

Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic Online, 2013, s.v. mati-. Brill: Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. mete, n.(1).

Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English. Michael B. Montgomery and Jennifer K.N. Heinmiller, eds. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 2021, s.v. meat, 629–30.

Morris, Richard, ed. The Story of Genesis and Exodus, second edition (1873). Early English Text Society O.S. 7. New York: Greenwood Press, 1996, 90, lines 3150–53.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2001, s.v. meat, n.

Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio), London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 5.1, 203/2. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Photo credit: US National Institutes of Health, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

march

Photograph of a crowd of mostly women bearing protest signs filling Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the US Capitol

Women’s March in Washington, DC, 21 January 2017

27 January 2025

March has many different meanings; the Oxford English Dictionary has six different entries for march as a noun and two as a verb. But the sense considered here is that of walking or moving forward.

The word first appears in English in the fifteenth century as a verb meaning to walk in step and in time, to move as a military unit. It’s first known appearance in English is in Henry Loverich’s poem The History of the Holy Grail, written c. 1410, where Loverich writes of the war between the King Lambor and the King Varlans:

It happede he hadde An Olde Cosin,
and vppon him Marchede, & was Sarrasyn,
but that Cristened nowe he was;
and to-Gederis sore werreden In eche plas.

(It happened that he had an old cousin, and he marched against him, and he had been a Saracen, but he now was christened; and they warred greatly with each other in every place.)

It, like many new words of the late Middle Ages, comes into English from French, which had a verb marcher, originally meaning to trample, but coming to mean to walk. The French verb has cognates in many different Romance and Germanic languages, and march’s ultimate origin is unknown. The two leading hypotheses are that it either comes from an Old High German verb marchon, meaning to mark (Old English had a cognate verb mearcian which gives us our modern to mark), or that it comes from the Latin marcus meaning hammer (the trample sense being key here).

The noun march, meaning an act of marching, comes down the pike by the year 1575. It appears in George Gascoigne’s poem The Fruites of Warre from that year:

If drummes once sounde a lustie martch in deede,
Then farewell bookes, for he will trudge with speede.

March as the name of a musical genre dates to at least 1588, and the metaphorical march, referring to steady and continuous progress, as in the phrase the march of time, appears by 1589 as a verb and by 1625 as a noun. George Puttenham writes of the need to use different styles for different subjects in his 1589 The Arte of English Poesie:

Finally the base things to be holden within their teder, by a low, myld, and simple maner of vtterance, creeping rather than clyming, and marching rather than mounting vpwardes, with the wings of stately subjects and stile.

Playwright John Fletcher includes these lines in his 1619 The Humorous Lieutenant:

2 Gent[leman]. Bewailing Sir a Souldier,
And one I think, your Grace will grieve to part with,
But every living thing——

Dem[etrius]. ’Tis true, must perish,
Our lives are but our Martches to our Graves.

Of course, nowadays not all marches are military. Protesters are fond of marching for or against various causes, but the use of the word in this context relatively new. In 1908, various groups of unemployed workers staged “hunger marches” on and in London demanding jobs. Many of these workers were veterans of the Boer War and some groups were extremely well organized, marshaled, and led by “sergeants,” marching in formation, and accompanied by ambulances, bands, and the like. And so the protest march was born. Many subsequent protesters have used the word march, but few have been as militaristic in organization and demeanor as their 1908 inspiration. And of course, the irony in modern anti-war protesters using a military tactic to stop a war is noteworthy.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Fletcher, John. The Humorous Lieutenant (1619). London: H.N., 1697, 3.5, 33–34. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Gascoigne, George. “The Fruites of Warre.” In The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, vol. 1. John W. Cunliffe, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1907, L’envoié, 183. International Robin Hood Bibliography.

Kempe, Dorothy, ed. The Legend of the Holy Grail. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 95. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1905, 336, lines 55.413–16. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2000, s.v. march, v.2, march, n.5.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, marchen, v.(2).  

Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. London: Richard Field, 1589, 126–127. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: Mobilus in Mobili, 21 January 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.