Ben Yagoda of Slate examines how the Internet has amplified the use of interjections and made them universal. Of particular interest to the columnist are the various uses of "aaha," "meh" and "feh."
It's not that e-mail, blogs, IM-ing, message boards, and texting have spawned a litter of brand-new interjections. (I don't count emoticons because you can't utter them, and I don't count acronyms like LOL and CU because they represent phrases with grammatical standing.) Rather, they have given lots of marginal ones, like awwa, a spelled-out form and thus a major shot in the arm. A personal favorite is meh, which (of course) has no definition in the OED but 737 separate ones on urbandictionary.com, including: "A random word when people either don't know what to say, don't care, can't answer a question or are too drunk to form a coherent english phrase." Meh—which can also be used as an adjective, e.g., "I felt kind of meh about the whole thing"—had the ultimate honor of being featured in a Simpsons exchange.
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Feh, a venerable Yiddish term indicating disgust or dismissal, has ridden to popularity on meh's coattails. "Flameviper," an urbandictionary.com contributor, explains some of feh's fine points: "When it is the answer to a question, it usually means 'no.' It is also used to calmly dismiss insults without resorting to a direct comeback (which could lead to a confrontation). Also used to dismiss orders. Sometimes (rarely) used in frustration."
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Interjections are suitable for online writing, as I say, because of the way online writing mimics speech. But newspaper and magazine writers who spell out interjections and other vocalisms run the risk of coming off as cute—as in yucky ew rather than adorable awwa. Most egregiously abused are what linguists call "discourse markers"—short sounds (it seems a stretch to call them "words") that speakers use to register hesitation, agreement, encouragement, ambivalence, and other responses. Uh, er, and um, in particular, have been flagrantly overused by feature writers and columnists to signal an impending attempt at irony or humor; the maneuver is now well beyond cliché, somewhere in the neighborhood of desperation.
That's easy for him to say. Sometimes you just need a good discourse marker to indicate your feelings of hesitation and, um, ambivalence about a certain subject. Heh.
