<I>Yadda Yadda Yadda</I>
Language, we all know,
allows us to say something. Yet it is also frequently called upon to say
nothing. There are semantically and grammatically complex ways of doing this,
as study of the transcript of any Eisenhower press conference will demonstrate.
There are also sundry off-the-rack locutions that can dress up language to
similar effect, such as the long-established blah
blah
blah , which, in a famous Far
Side cartoon, is what animals
perceive human beings to be saying to one another.
In recent months, in
contexts where I have grown accustomed to expect a resigned or satiric
blah
blah
blah , I have been hearing the phrase
yadda
yadda
yadda instead, as in: "First they tell me one
thing, then they tell me another thing, yadda
yadda
yadda ." My own informal tracking, conducted over a period of several
weeks, suggests a blah - blah - blah displacement rate of
about 50 percent in the thirtysomething-and-under demographic segment. In
attempting to "walk back the cat" (to use the increasingly prevalent argot of
the intelligence services for tracing a chain of events backward to establish a
point of origin), I have found yadda - yadda - yadda strands
in episodes of Seinfeld and Home Improvement . The most compelling
manifestation, though, is in an advertisement for Converse athletic shoes
featuring images of Kevin Johnson of the Phoenix Suns that was aired on
national television during last spring's basketball championships:
"Plus, he
don't badmouth anybody. He don't cop an attitude. Ffff! You'd have to be nuts
not to want a guy like that on your team. So anyways, KJ, KJ, he's our man.
Ya ta da Ya ta da Ya ta da. Converse."
The man who wrote the copy, Richard Herstek, the creative
director at a Boston-based advertising agency, recalls that he had four seconds
to fill in a 30-second commercial. "Yadda
yadda
yadda ,"
whose spelling he was uncertain of, "simply seemed funnier than blah
blah
blah or et cetera, et cetera ."
Why did the term occur to
Herstek at all? An associate of his from more than a decade ago, he says, used
it from time to time "along with a lot of other phrases that sounded Yiddish."
The various lexicographers I have consulted are quite certain, however, that
yadda
yadda
yadda is not of Yiddish origin.
Although
the term is known to have been around for a while, documentary evidence for it
is sparse--as is so often the case in matters involving oral culture. Richard
Herstek indicated that he, like me, was now hearing yadda
yadda
yadda more frequently than ever, but he modestly disclaimed
responsibility. True, our experience could simply be the result of what might
be called the Awareness Tautology: One's sense of a phenomenon's pervasiveness
is heightened by the fact of one's having been alerted to the phenomenon in the
first place. Still, yadda
yadda
yadda 's nascent currency
is indirectly confirmed by the matter-of-fact use, in the Los Angeles
Times , of the term in the participial phrase "doing the
yadda - yadda ."
Two things are happening. First, a newly
prominent form of what is known as "sound symbolism" is crowding out some older
ones in competition for a familiar piece of habitat. English has long had
various ways of mimicking the generic sound of spoken language, the noise of a
crowd, or idle chatter (chatter being such a word). The class of onomatopoeic
and reduplicative terms for spoken language is large : blather, buzz-buzz,
chitchat, fiddle-faddle, jibber-jabber, yakety-yak, yuk-yuk . The earliest
appearances of something resembling yadda
yadda
yadda in
print derive from its use in sound-symbolic fashion, as in this exchange from a
short story (about anthropomorphic ducks) appearing in a 1949 issue of the
Saturday Evening Post :
"Stop it, Mike!" Minnie
would call crossly. "Pay attention to your flying, for pity's sake!"
"Back-seat flying," Mike
would grumble. "Always the yaddega-yaddega from the back seat."
Wentworth
and Flexner's Dictionary
of
American
Slang provides
a citation for the similar form yatata yatata yatata from the play
Jim
Dandy : A Fat Man in a Famine (1947) by William
Saroyan. A different sort of theatrical provenance is offered by an informant
with experience in several large-cast stage productions. In scenes where people
in a crowd are supposed to be talking animatedly but unintelligibly to one
another, she observes, the effect is sometimes achieved by having half the cast
members say blah
blah
blah and the other half say
yadda
yadda
yadda .
The second thing happening is not so much etymological as
sociological: a continuing evolution in semantic function. Terms such as
yadda
yadda
yadda and blah
blah
blah
have a special utility when the speaker's audience can accurately fill in the
blanks--when the terms act not as synonyms for "generic talk" but as command
keys, cued to circumstance, that can designate specific information. In other
words, what yadda
yadda
yadda can convey is something
like: "You and I know all the points that would ordinarily be inserted at this
place in the conversation, so let's just skip it and move on."
This usage points to
yadda
yadda
yadda 's larger social significance: It
suggests that an ever-larger percentage of the content of everyday
communication can be correctly anticipated--probably owing in part to the sheer
repetition of words and arguments in the various public media. I am not aware
of any studies comparing the number of words an average person could expect to
hear spoken in a typical day 500 years ago vs. the number that can be heard
now, but the increase surely is vast. If a politician were to say today that he
opposes abortion except when yadda
yadda
yadda , we would
all know what he means, and we would know what was meant if, after an arrest, a
police officer pulled out a card and just said yadda
yadda
yadda . Adults have always been struck by how much teen-age communication
can seemingly be accomplished by emitting one of perhaps half a dozen subverbal
phonemes, and it will be instructive to watch as something along these same
lines spreads to the general population.
As noted, lexicographers for
obvious reasons have far more trouble gathering oral citations than written
ones. To aid the larger lexicographical enterprise, I'm interested in
collecting samples of references to yadda
yadda
yadda (or
similarly imitative terms) in any communications media other than paper. Date
and explicit provenance must be provided. The information will be turned over
to experienced professionals. It would only be fitting that yadda
yadda
yadda make it formally into one dictionary before obviating
the need for dictionaries at all.
