I am a huge fan of new words, shortened words, throwing -tastic at the end of anything to make an adjective, misusing suffixes and prefixes, and even occasionally mixing 2 languages for new words (like saying boozeria for the liquor store, or xingqiFriday for the day of the week). We've all heard strategery, lolz, frienemies, blergh, and so on.
So I was happy to read that
meh is now official. I use this word all the time to express indifference, or if I'm trying to be polite when I don't like something and instead of saying it's terrible, I can say it's just meh. I never really thought about it not being an actual word or that people wouldn't understand what I was saying. Americans (and generally, English speakers), even if they have never seen The Simpsons, can usually deduce the meaning from the dismissive tone or the shrug of shoulders. One day when I was in Beijing, I was in a taxi with my then-bf, who's from from the mainland. He asked my opinion about something and since I didn't really care for it one way or another, I said meh. Him not being a native English speaker, and definitely not an avid watcher of the Simpsons, just looked at me with a confused face and said "what?" I said, "Meh. m-e-h. meh." (As if quoting the episode would clarify the situation or perhaps make him appreciate my wittiness...) He responded "I don't know that word. What does it mean?" After a few seconds of thought, I said it wasn't actually a word, that it was closer to slang, but that it meant indifferent. If you don't really like something but don't really hate it, it's meh.
It's a funny thing to explain slang to people who are learning your language as a second language. What was even more common was explaining how we use words in different ways than their intended meaning. For example, my roommate and co-worker in Beijing (who's American) and I both like to say 'that's so balls' when something sucks. Explaining that to non-English speakers is tricky. How do you explain that balls can be the equivalent to something being bad when balls are just things that you toss around in various sports (and that when we say something is balls cause it sucks, well we mean a different kind of ball)? Then I ran into the added difficulty that when I said it means "it sucks," many Chinese people had learned that that's a bad word. Fair enough, I mean, when I really think about it, it does make me giggle (I have the sense of humor of an 8 year old boy - omg! that internet quiz did figure me out!). But I've just used these phrases so much that I'm desensitized from their actual meanings. I hadn't had anyone be offended by 'that sucks' since my youngin days in Alabama, and even then I thought it was such a tame phrase. I guess I could've said it sucks like a vacuum cleaner or a black hole, but that doesn't really make sense. I think I ended up explaining that it's just not that bad (I mean, it's no "that's some motherfuckin bullshit" right?) Basically, that whole interchange just taught me that I need to not use slang phrases that involve male genitalia when talking to people who don't use slang.
Luckily meh is totally inoffensive and so easily rolls off the tongue when experiencing something mediocre that it was pretty easy to explain, and now at least one person in China is using meh the way the lord intended it.
