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.

concentration camp

An open gate with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work sets you free) over the top; a brick building is behind it

Gate at the Auschwitz concentration camp

31 January 2025

One might, with some justification, think that the term concentration camp, like the term genocide, came out of Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II, but that is not the case. The term is almost half a century older, coming out of another war, the Cuban War of Independence (1895–98).

Concentration camp is an anglophone term to describe the camps in which the Spanish government of Cuba resettled what they called reconcentrados, a word that was also borrowed into English at the time. The earliest example of concentration camp that I have found is in a report from a US consul to Cuba that was reported in Michigan’s Copper Country Evening News on 24 May 1897:

A consular report from Cuba tells of a new order of concentration. The effect of it will be to add greatly to the horrors of the situation. The suffering will be increased, and the deaths will be more numerous. The order, so far as the consul knows, applies to about one-third of the province of Santa Clara. This is the region of sugar estates.

Obliged to form camps.

Under the original order of concentration the agricultural population was obliged to form camps at the centrals, or grinding plants, of such estates as maintained a Spanish garrison. This permitted the farming population to gather in bodies of from 500 to 1,000. By this distribution in small bodies the reconcentrados were able to find some subsistence. The smaller concentration has been attended with less hardship than the larger. The new order just made by the Spanish authorities abolishes the concentration camps on the sugar estates. It directs that only [sic] points of concentration in the district shall be the cities having municipal organizations. In this district there are but three “municipals,” as they are called.

Must Move to Three Towns.

To these three points the entire farming population will now be driven. The report from the consul says:

“There are twenty-five estates on which the camps of reconcentrados had been established. The camps averaged 500 persons. Now these persons, 12,500 in all, must move to the three towns. In the camps on the estates they had built shanties, which must be abandoned. That, however, is not the worst feature. They had planted gardens and were about to realize food crops. All must be left behind, and the 12,500 must be added to the three large camps, where the people are starving. The situation is becoming worse every day, and this new order is going to aggravate it.

Another early use is in the Louisville Courier Journal of 17 July 1897. Weyler was the Spanish governor-general of Cuba General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau:

“In the beginning of the concentration,” this American writes, “the people driven into the towns were occasionally allowed to go to the country on passes and search for food to bring back to the camp. Having such passes, they sometimes escaped the notice of the scouting parties. Now, however, the Spanish columns have received orders from Weyler to shoot any one, whether furnished with a pass or not, wherever found outside of the concentration camp. I will give an example of the operation of this new order, to show how it works. The little town of Mata is situated near the railroad. It had in time of peace about 100 inhabitants and four stores. Under concentration 3,500 reconcentrados have been collected there.”

While the Spanish did have terms for the people who were interned in such camps, concentrados and reconcentrados, they did not have a special term for the camps themselves. The term campo de concentración did not appear until 1918.

The Cuban War of Independence ended in 1898 with the intervention of the United States on the Cuban side, a theater in the global Spanish-American War, which also netted the United States the Philippines as a colony. But concentration camps would again appear in another colonial war, the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902), when the British interned many Dutch Boer settlers and Indigenous peoples in such camps. There is this transcript of parliamentary debate from the Aberdeen Journal of 18 June 1901:

CONCENTRATION CAMPS

In answer to Mr Scott,

Mr BRODRICK, Secretary for War, said the numbers in the concentration camps were approximately as follows:—Transvaal, 37,739; Natal, 2524; Orange River Colony, 20,374; and Cape Colony, 2490. Of these a large number were natives. The dietary of free issues consisted of meat, bread or flour, meal, coffee, sugar, salt, and condensed milk. The supply of meat ranged from 2 to 4lbs., and of bread, flour, and meal about 7lbs. per week. The women and children had in most instances been brought into the camps because they could not be fed at isolated stations, or because it was necessary for military reasons to clear the districts in which they were living. He was communicating with Lord Kitchener respecting the release of those who might have friends willing to receive them.

Mr LLOYD GEORGE asked for information as to the rate of mortality in these camps.

Mr HERBERT LEWIS said it would perhaps be convenient if he at once put a question of which he had been given private notice, viz., whether the Government was aware that for three weeks ending the 13th May there were 80 deaths out of a total of 3125 persons at the refugee camp on the Racecourse at Johannesburg, and that 220 persons were reported sick in the camp.

And like the Spanish campo de concentración, the Afrikaans konsentrasiekamp was coined as a historical term in 1921.

In contrast, the German Konzentrationslager didn’t make an appearance until 1920, referring to hypothetical camps, and 1933, referring to real ones. The Spanish, Afrikaans, and German terms are calques of the English one.

There is a more innocuous sense of concentration camp that also dates to the Spanish-American War, that is with the meaning of a military assembly location. There is this from the Boston Daily Advertiser with a dateline of 10 May 1898:

Washington, May 10.—Maj.-Gen. Sewell has been assigned to command the concentration camp near Falls Church, Va. This is taken as an indication that the general has concluded to accept his military command, risking his tenure in office as a senator thereby.

(The OED has similar quotation from 12 May, but that one is incorrectly dated. Both the dictionary and NewspaperArchive.com’s metadata give the date as 1897, but it is actually from a year later.)

This military sense of concentration camp would also get some use in the British military. From the Friend of India of 7 September 1899:

The Government of India have sanctioned the Imperial Service troops taking part in the coming winter’s manœuvres, and it is settled that the Mysore Cavalry will join the concentration camp near Bangalore.

Of course, unfavorable press about the camps in South Africa, and of course the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, pretty much ended this military sense of the phrase.

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Sources:

“Concentration Camps” (17 June 1901). Aberdeen Journal (Scotland), 18 June 1901, 6/2. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

“Has Sewell Accepted?” Boston Daily Advertiser (Massachusetts), 11 May 1898, 1/5. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2015, s.v. concentration camp, n., concentrado, n.; June 2009, s.v. reconcentrado, n.

“Telegram from Lee.” Copper Country Evening News (Calumet Michigan), 24 May 1897, 1/2. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

“Troops Ordered to Cuba.” Elkhart Weekly Truth (Indiana), 12 May 1898, 4/6. NewspaperArchive.com. (Note the database’s metadata incorrectly gives the date as 1897, an error which the OED repeats.)

“Weyler’s Victims.” Louisville Courier Journal, 17 July 1897, 9/5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Winter Military Manœuvres” (5 September). Friend of India, 7 September 1899, 12/3. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.

Photo credit: Xiquinhosilva, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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.

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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.