September 22, 1997

yadda-yadda-yadda

Jesse, "yadda yadda yadda" has been used in slang for some time, and the term was even used as a basis for a recent Seinfeld episode. This morning I actually saw it used in the Washington Post! Has this term made it into any dictionaries, and how old is "yadda yadda yadda"?

Yadda yadda yadda has in fact made it into a dictionary--the Random House Webster's College Dictionary, I'm again happy to say. We've been paying attention to the term for several years, and finally decided that it was time to add it. The definition, you might be interested to know, is simply blah-blah-blah, a cross-reference.

It's hard to pinpoint an exact date for yadda-yadda-yadda, also spelled yada-yada-yada; yadayadayada; and other variants, in part because it's hard to decide which variants should be considered the same word. In the late 1940s, for example, we find yaddega-yaddega and yatata-yatata-yatata--this is the same era, remember, that gave us the now-established yackety-yack. But by the early 1960s, the comedian Lenny Bruce was certainly using yadda-yadda-yadda, and we have examples from then on.

One problem with expressions of this nature is that they are primarily oral, and are harder to find in print, but there are still enough examples that we know it's very popular now. It's in the Washington Post, yes, and also in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, Newsweek, and pretty much any place else you'd care to look, including such pop-cultural sources as Seinfeld and the Dilbert cartoons.

Versions of blah-blah-blah are found in the 1910s. Both expressions are onomatopoeic, meant to be imitative of speech.