Meh

If I have learnt anything from reading and writing blogs it is this – Nothing happens as planned.

If someone says they’re going to blog on Friday, check back on Monday. If the subject is supposed to be films, then anticipate music. First in a series? I doubt the topic will ever be mentioned again. In short, your average blogger tends to make lots of plans and forget about them just as quickly…and I’m pretty much your average blogger.

Hence my earlier blog suggesting a topic for last Friday, obviously that went out the window. However, despite Dave’s first law of blogging (Don’t expect the expected) I am going to try and stick to a couple of very generic ideas.

Firstly come wind or rain, sun or snow, nuclear apocalypse or Armageddon I’m going to blog twice a week. The only exception being holidays and other periods where I can’t access a PC. That said I’m just a poor ex-student so holidays are fairly limited at the moment.

Secondly, I’m going to alternate between a blog style post and a piece of poetry. Hopefully this should force me into at least a little bit of creative writing each week.

Any more targets than that and I would be doomed to failure (curse my own innate laziness), so I won’t even try.

Right, on to a semi-serious post.
As you, my intelligent, well dressed, good looking readership, may be aware from your daily perusal of your favourite broadsheet or red top, ‘Meh’ has been recognised as a word by Collins (they make dictionaries, but you already knew that).

Now don’t get me wrong, I am all for the general addition of new words to the dictionary as they move into everyday parlance, but surely you have to draw a line somewhere. Meh, is not to my mind a proper word. Internet is a new word, fantastic, stick it in the dictionary. Meh is more of a sound, like saying hmm or tutting. Lol is probably recognised as a word now, what next? Zomg? Rofl? (actually rofl is probably recognised as a word already…what is the world coming to?? FFS?)

I guess my basic feeling is that terms that are widely used multi-cultural slang or abbreviations(particularly relating to the Internet) should not necessarily be added to the English language. What makes something a word?? Lots of people using it? Millions of people play World of Warcraft, so should we just add terms from that into English?? Of course not. Should we add every technical or slang term from every pastime, hobby or community (online or otherwise) to the language?? We could, but we’d end up with a dictionary substantially larger than what we have now (and the full English dictionary is pretty huge as it is).

On a similar note, I feel that in most cases you should wait a reasonable period to see if a word continues to be used. When I was eight, perhaps the two most common words were lush, and cool. Both obviously used outside of their normal context. People still say cool, but it’s a pretty long time since I heard anything called lush (do primary school kids still say that??).

No doubt, you’ll have your own opinion on this and fair play to you for that. However I feel there should be a line drawn between what is ultimately slang that may just be passing through and real words, the ones that everyone uses every day…like zugzwang and fianchetto

Until next time this is Dave Marshall telling you to use a spell checker (it won't recognise meh)