Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Friday, October 07, 2011

Pah!

Are you like me? Do you not in the slightest bit understand the fascination and attraction people have for "meh"? People say "meh," like it expresses something. Minor scorn, apathy. Disinterest, I guess. Whatever it may be, they say "meh." And unless I misread the mood, they seem kind of proud to say it. Like they've made a statement. Sometimes I think it's their weak attempt to approximate a gallic shrug in language, or something. Does it really get that across? I'm not getting it. It's a gravy word, except only if gravy had no flavor, if gravy were gruel, if the point of adding gravy was to add no savor or richness at all, but rather to just...drip something gray and watery and thin across the top. "What's that you say? Let me put my 'meh' on top of that! That's what I do in these situations."

It leaves me cold, frankly, this "meh" business. For one thing, I have never in my life heard anyone say it out loud. Please, those of you who dispense your "meh" here and your "meh" there, so freely, so willy-nilly - where did you get that? Did you read it, and like the effect? Every try it out loud? Take an experiment, for your own sake. Give it the ol' cold turkey, tell yourself "I will not use 'meh' once more in writing until I've used it at least three times out loud." If you make that pledge and stick to it, do you think you'll ever use "meh" again?

I doubt it. But then, maybe I have a better opinion of you than you deserve. Because to me, saying "meh" out loud in any situation where you routinely use it typing is approximately the best way to look like a total asshole. I mean, I try to be charitable, here. I try to give you enough credit to recognize that, if you were to try the experiment. But maybe not, I could be wrong.

I swear, never once in my entire life have I heard "meh" used out loud. Maybe I'm just lucky, or traveling with a select crowd or something. Heck, I remember one time I said "SIGH!" out loud. As a word. I was just a kid, I'd picked it up from context reading Charlie Brown, and I thought it was a word that people said in situations like that, in contexts such as those in which Charlie Brown finds himself customarily embroiled. But guess what, it's not a word to say out loud, as an exclamation, in those contexts. Or in any contexts. It doesn't work. Sometimes onomatopoeia just doesn't really cut it.

I wonder sometimes how these enervated "meh"-heads can summon up the energy to hit those three keys. "Meh," they tell us, as if it means something: as if it expresses to you some fact about their state of mind, as if it conveys their very mild disdain for whatever proposition has been advanced, or for whatever topic is being discussed. Anyone who says "meh," you can be sure of one thing: that's really the best, most interesting thing that they could come up with to say on that topic. But since that's the case...why are they bothering to add this noise to our hopefully comparatively signal-heavy ratio? Who are these people, who think their "meh" is news worth broadcasting? "Meh," you say?

Well, what the fuck to that. I'm sure I don't know why you'd bother. When everybody who uses it puts it out there with airs, as if they've just made some definitive pronouncement! "Meh," as if their "meh" carries weight! "Meh," they say: "Meh."

Well FUCK your "meh," buddy. That's what I say. Stick that "meh" up your "meh"-hole and "meh" off while you're doing it.

2 comments:

lacrema said...

Huh.

*slight shoulder shrug*

dogimo said...

"Huh" I love! I say huh all the time. There's no context where it can't work, and you're not really setting yourself as if to imply an insufficiency in whatever you're addressing it to. Many and loud are the huhs of wonder! Intrigued, intriguing, deeply involved are the huhs of puzzlement. Certainly there are the huhs of being purely and simply non-plussed, but every possible "huh" has (in my mind) infinitely more force, vitality and eloquence than these feeble, enervated and enervating "mehs."