From the people who brought you "D'Oh!", we now have "Meh" from The Simpsons entering our lexicon, just a fancy word for dictionary by the way.
Here is a passage from the AP:
[Meh.] The expression of indifference or boredom has gained a place in the Collins English Dictionary after generating a surprising amount of enthusiasm among lexicographers.
Publisher HarperCollins announced Monday the word had been chosen from terms suggested by the public for inclusion in the dictionary's 30th anniversary edition, to be published next year.
The origins of "meh" are murky, but the term grew in popularity after being used in a 2001 episode of "The Simpsons" in which Homer suggests a day trip to his children Bart and Lisa.
(It's certainly better than when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles re-popularized "Cowabunga!", which Apple's Spotlight dictionary informs me actually originated from the Howdy Doody Show.)
So it's official: we now have one more word to describe our indifference, apathy, disinterest, malaise, insouciance, and general boredom with doing anything so bold as taking a stand on a position—whether political, economic, scientific, or philosophical. I must say that there's a certain irony to the fact that this news is preferably referred to as "lexical" and not "lexiconical" (or "lexiconal") by my word-processing software. I'll be the judge of that, thank you very much (see below)! I grant that lexiconical doesn't sound as nice as lexical, but what if my blog post is about the state of the whole lexicon moreso than about the state of the words that comprise it? It's rough either way. So which word do I think describes my reaction to the announcement and my inability to type my thoughts on the matter crisply: Ehhhh, "meh". (You saw that coming.)
So what do you think? Ought this word be a word in the dictionary? Shakespeare certainly gets credited with inventing new words in the dictionary. What does it mean for a word to be in the dictionary—to be ‘official' and recognized in the first place? Ought anyone even care what is placed in or left out? Your decision on this matter ought not sink to the level of meh. In fact, divesting one of one's ability "to mean" something with words is cheating one of an understanding of what language is for. Do not leave it in the hands of lexicographers any more than you want bureaucrats in Washington to run your life; or paper-pushers to decide your health coverage instead of doctors; or scientists who study physico-chemical properties of neurotransmitters to tell you what a first kiss feels like or when you're in love. Meaning is not for dictionaries. Life is not the business of bureaucrats and scientists. They are different levels of analysis and significance. Grab a cup of coffee and a poet and you'll have a better shot of getting closer to the issue.
Where do words come from? In some sense, they are merely arbitrary sounds put together. But that seems empty. Different languages certainly sound different and have different sounds for different words, somewhat out of historical contingency, I grant. Different parts of the same country even can have different sounds for the same ‘word'. What interests me is that I think we don't really hear the ‘sounds' of words in normal language use, rather we hear ‘words' themselves, and there is a big difference there. It is this distinction between hearing sounds and hearing words that is at the crux of the issue of whether we ought to care what's in the dictionary. Words have meaning, both in the sense of some matter of discourse but also in our imaginations. They populate our narratives of ourselves and our culture. Words are our meanings. Sounds, however, are more like noise, at the level of an indistinguishable, undifferentiated acoustic stream: a meh of the natural world. One can measure the real, objective properties of this meh, but those tell a very different story than the real lives of the subjects discussed. We do not hear such white noise of sounds when we as young children seem intuitively to open our eyes wider to look for the source of a speaker. We do not hear the sounds "ah+ee+luh+uh+vuh+yuh+oo" on Valentine's Day. Instead, we hear the words, "I love you" and they have meaning.
So does a word get its meaning because of an authority figure or institution bestowing upon that word its meaning from without? Or does a word get its meaning because people agree (implicitly) to use it in a particular way to share a way of living or life? Clearly I think the latter. Words bind us for good and bad because they tell our stories. We do not consult dictionaries to tell us stories; some of the chapters in them are really long! We do not need an official decree for what is meaningful in our language. We know what is valued in the reaction in someone's face when we tell them someone has died or that they've just won the lottery.
Consider this passage from Heidegger's Being and Time: "What we ‘first' hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking waggon [sic], the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire cracking. It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear' a ‘pure noise'. (H. 163-164)
The dictionary, for all its "mehs" and otherwise, is a good paperweight, but it is certainly not where I look for meaning.
