"Blah, blah, blah" and the Ungooglable Phrase

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Well, hello there, 20,000 Hertz producer Amelia Tate. How's it going, Dallas? How's your day been so far? I mean, it's the morning for you, right? I just drank three cups of coffee, so hopefully it's going to get a lot better. Real quick. Nice, nice. And do you know what we're talking about today? I know we're talking about blah, blah, blah. I mean, it's really funny. I was talking to my husband last week and I was like...

oh, I'm doing a podcast episode on blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. And he looked at me really concerned. And I was like, what? And he was like, tell me what it's about. And I was like, no, it's literally about blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. Blah, blah, blah and yada, yada, yada are terms you've probably heard before, whether it's in everyday conversation or in a movie or TV show.

For instance, there's the classic Seinfeld episode, The Yadda Yadda. Are you close with your parents? Well, they gave birth to me and yadda yadda. Yadda what? Yadda yadda yadda. I mean, these aren't confusing terms to you, right? You've heard them before. You would know how to spell them. Yeah. It's, you know, if somebody's just droning on and on and on about a subject, you would go, you know, and blah, blah, blah. You get the gist of it. Right.

The word blah was first recorded in print in 1918. It showed up in the published diaries of journalist Howard Vincent O'Brien, which were titled Wine, Women and War. Here's a quote. Colonel H here today. pulled old blah about service, doing one's bit, etc. As for yadda yadda, comedian Lenny Bruce popularized the phrase in his performances in the 1960s. Yadda yadda! Yadda yadda!

Since then, yadda yadda yadda and blah blah blah have had plenty written about them. They're googleable, they're spellable, and there have been articles written about their origins. But what fascinated me... is that there's a sort of longtime cousin of blah, blah, blah, and yada, yada, yada, which is not in the dictionary. It's not really Google-able. I hear my friends say it all the time. I've never seen it written down. I'm hoping that you recognize it.

it. It is, let me clear my throat. Sorry, I need to get it right because there's five. It is da da da da da. No, hang on. So I'm telling a story. Me and Dallas are chatting. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Do you hear what I'm saying? Like when you say fine. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

I have never heard that before in conversation. It's actually so hard to say it consciously. Like I'm trying to read it from a sheet and I'm like, actually, it only works when you say it naturally. Okay, maybe some examples will help. Here are some dars in the fantasy cartoon Adventure Time. So yeah, this all goes down again. Bomb goes off. So yeah, the crown is totally gone.

And here's a clip from the film Florence Foster Jenkins, where Meryl Streep shows a newspaper review to Hugh Grant. Page seven. Here, here, down below. And the consensus was that she'd never sung better. These dars also show up in the first episode of the TV drama Scorpion, when a hacker is searching for the ideal person to call in an emergency.

Can't make over six figures. Can't work for a tech company. Salesmen! Salesmen never turn off their phones. They risk losing business. And... Gordon Tooley! And there's a meta reference to them in the BBC mockumentary W1A, while characters are debating what to write in a statement to the press.

Exactly, Simon, yes. In response, the BBC issued a statement in which it described the role of head values as, you know, da-da-da-da-da-da, something or other. Brilliant. Yes, although, is it just me, or is da-da-da-da-da-da something or other not quite going to do it somehow? A lot of the times we use it, it might be if you were reciting a list or reciting a story. So I'd say me and Dallas had a chat, the episode will be out in a few months.

See, there I managed to get the intonation right. Maybe I have. It's really fun because it seems like you can really put any drum cadence you want with it. da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Yeah, it is quite musical. You can mix up the intonation and often it's five da's, sometimes it's three da's, like da-da-da.

Sometimes it's four. Here, for example, are three dars followed by four dars in the reality TV show The Real L Word. And I was like, yeah, I was like, she's cute. Like, she's not her time. But I'm like, she's not my time. And all I said was that. Yes, I may have made a joke in the heat of the moment. But five does seem to be the magic number, like here in the film The Age of Stupid.

And she just basically took me straight over to Piers and said, hey, look, you know, Piers, this is Lisa. And that was it. The problem that I had, which I seem to have a lot with these stories, is that I couldn't Google it because I couldn't spell it, right? Is it duh with a U?

Is it da with an A? Is there a H on the end? Is it even just kind of like the letter D by itself? Is there any sort of official spelling or can we just make it up? So I think we can make it up. Ooh, I like that. I think I'd like to... go for a D-A-H. That feels right to me. Let's name it and claim it. D-A-H it is if you deem so. Okay, maybe we should christen it like the five da or the five da phenomenon or something.

But what exactly are the five dars? What do they mean and where do they come from? Why do we use them but never acknowledge them? I wanted to email a bunch of experts to be like, does anyone know what I'm on about? It's a very hard email to draft because, as I said, you can't spell it. You just have to kind of hope that people know what you're talking about and have come across the sound. But thankfully, one expert did get what I meant.

You approached me with your email and gave this example, and I thought, yeah, this sounds like something I probably heard before. My name is Paul Saka. I teach at the University of Texas, and I have a PhD in linguistics and a PhD in philosophy. In 2017, Paul published a paper entitled Blah, Blah, Blah. Quasi-quotation and unquotation. He explained to me exactly what quasi-quotation is.

When you report what someone else has said, you can do it with different reasons in mind, and you can do it in different ways. So, for example, if I tell you about what John told me...

John said his boss is an effing nut job. That claim of mine is open to interpretation. I could mean it strictly in the sense that he himself used the slightly euphemistic way of describing his boss, or I can mean to convey that he himself used the full expletive, and I'm the one who is being a little euphemistic about it. You see those two interpretations? So the first one is called strict quotation and the second interpretation is known as quasi-quotation.

I'm quoting John, I'm reporting what he said, but I'm not using entirely his exact words. Blah, blah, blah is one common way that we use quasi-quotation. Here's a clip from Family Guy that pokes fun at this idea. Carter sent $100,000 to a Nigerian prince who's going to give him a million!

Oh, Peter, don't tell me you two fell for that scam. It's the oldest email scam out there. The assets are frozen, you cover legal fees, blah, blah, blah. Oh, my God, he did say blah, blah, blah. It's not just blah, blah, blah. There are other... I call them devices of quasi-quotation. One example is so-and-so and another is such-and-such. Here's some narration from the movie Magnolia. And we generally say, well, if that was in a movie, I wouldn't believe it.

Someone so-and-so met someone else's so-and-so and so on. And of course, there's yadda yadda yadda. Here's a scene from Frasier showing what Eddie the dog hears when the humans talk. But where exactly do these nonsensical sounding terms come from? These words don't occur out of nothing. The first yada, yada, yada was Lonnie Bruce, but looking a bit earlier, in the 1940s, the OED reports yatata, yatata, yatata.

In the 1947 musical Allegro, there's a song called Yattata Yattata Yattata that mocks meaningless conversation. You can hear here how the phrase is a pretty perfect onomatopoeia of a chatty room. Broccoli. Hardbox. Balderdash. Bony baloney. Stripe and trash. And you can see how yatada yatada yatada may become yada yada yada. It's just a little reduction, a little simplification. I should also add that it has been speculated...

Yada, yada, yada derives from the verb to yadder. And yadder is comparatively recent. It is conjectured that it's a blend of to yak or yammer. and to chatter. Similarly, blah, blah, blah likely evolved from the word blabber, which then got shortened to blab and eventually just blah. So we live in this environment where there are tens of thousands of words floating around and we have imperfect memory of them. So whoever first used Yadr might have honestly believed that they were not.

innovating, that they were not creating a new word, that they were not blending Yammer and Chatter. But this is just a brain glitch. And these brain glitches are one source of linguistic change. It turns out it is pretty easy for these brain glitches to spread from person to person. I saw an estimate that yada yada yada makes up less than one in 100 million words. So you statistically need to hear more than 100 million words before you ever run across yada yada yada. Yet the human mind...

is genetically programmed to be a kind of sponge for vocabulary. You might have only heard it once or twice in your whole life, but you remember the word. Even in the meager context where you first heard it, you were able to arrive at a reasonable hypothesis as to what the term means. Of course, not everyone uses these terms.

I actually practice the opposite. It's very hard for me not to use filler words, but because I've been on podcasts before, I have naturally used filler words and had listeners write me and be like, Stop using like like you just did just then, Dallas. I want to be more da-da-da-da-da-y naturally. But all of my public speaking books and gurus say the opposite. Bye.

Regardless of whether we should yadda, blah and da, the simple fact is that many of us do. But if we can trace blah to 1918 and yadda to the 1940s, where on earth did da-da-da-da-da come from? That's coming up after the break. Back when I started remote recording, the setup was complicated. You needed studios, engineers, and lots of patience. Now there's Riverside. And while it is amazing for recording podcasts, that's only the beginning.

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In the English language, there are a variety of terms that essentially mean etc. Here's Lisa Simpson demonstrating one. I don't understand. Dad would never miss an open bar with chicken wings. Plus he loves mom and us, yadda yadda yadda. And here's Louise Belcher with another. What if we read her journal? Blah, blah, blah. Teen stuff. Hormones. Tina's going to the top of Mount Wind again by herself?

But there's another similar phrase that gets a lot less attention, and that's the humble da. It comes in threes and fours, but very often you hear five da's in a row. Here they are in a YouTube video from the Insider Food channel. The Taco Bell-ization of Mexican food, like, oh, somebody getting sour cream and diced onions and tomatoes and shredded cheese and da-da-da-da-da. But sometimes you get even more.

Here's Pharrell Williams with seven DAS. In fact, whenever I did say, man, I'm going to do da-da-da-da-da-da-da, it does the exact opposite. Didn't work like that. Here's philosopher Dan Dennett with eight. They'll get together and they'll say, You know, my uncle, I've got an uncle who thinks da-da-da-da-da-da-da. What do you think of that? And here's former governor and pro wrestler Jesse Ventura with a whopping nine da's.

Let me explain why, because everybody right away went, oh, what a joke, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. As far as I can tell, no one has yet explained where da came from. Yes, so I wrote and published a whole big article which looks at blah, blah, blah, and yada, yada, yada, and it never occurred to me to talk about da-da-da. But Paul does have a few theories.

First, he told me that in Morse code, the dots and dashes are colloquially called dits and dars. So potentially, the word dars spread from there. So that's one possibility. I think it's an esoteric possibility because not a whole lot of people know that users of Morse code use these terms dit and da.

Another possibility is that da is a reduction of dash or dot, two pieces of punctuation we use to convey that we're skipping over something or missing it out. When you're writing something down, you might add a dot, dot, dot, also known as an ellipsis. Here's a clip from Mamma Mia. We danced on the beach and we kissed on the beach and dot dot dot. What? Dot dot dot. That's what they did in the olden days. Da might come from dot.

If somehow that final T gets reduced down to nothing. I mean, when I came to you, I called it a verbal ellipses. Do you think that that's a fair thing to call? Could I christen it that? Yes, I think that's a marvelous description of the phenomenon, a verbal ellipsis. We are used to seeing the three to four dots as a sign of ellipsis in writing.

So that might be a reason why blah blah blah and da da da might often appear within a set of three. Repeating it more times, say five, just adds that extra bit of emphasis and even a sense of melody.

which linguists call prosody. One thought that did occur to me is that coronal consonants in English, such as the D and T, are very frequently used for non-lexical purposes. Coronal consonants are sounds we make when our tongue curves upwards and touches the spot behind our front teeth. So, da-da-da-da-da. And ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. It occurs a lot in music, right? The police have a song. And then there's Tom Steiner by Suzanne Vega.

We also find it in zippity-doo-dah. Or if you want to refer to an object without specifying what kind of object it is, you might call it a doodad. We also find interjections like whoop-de-doo. I've also noticed that people use the letter D when interrupting someone. Here's a scene from the film Big Fat Liar. You... almost cost me my job. Frank, I'm sorry, I can explain. You hear that? I don't want to hear it, okay?

People also use it when they're telling someone to hold their horses. Here's a clip from the sitcom Happy Endings, where one character is anxious to get in the hot tub. First we have to hand out the candy. So the point is, if you want to utter an interjection that has comparatively little meaning in and of itself, which syllables do you utter? In English...

It looks like D is somehow favoured. But why do we prefer D? It might just be because it's an easier sound to make. Wild speculation might be that there's a smaller cost to enunciating it. If it takes a little less muscular enervation to flip the tip of your tongue against the front of your mouth that way. And I think the most important possibility is that these various speculations are not mutually exclusive.

A lot of linguistic phenomena are the result of what's known as multiple motivation. In other words it's most likely some combination of several of these factors.

So English speakers favour da's, and we're also partial to some blahs and some yadda's. But what do people from other parts of the world use to convey the same meaning? My name is Helen Abadzi. I am a Greek cognitive psychologist who speaks 19 languages, incidentally. The languages that I know are your usual list of European stuff.

but also Romanian and Albanian, Hindi, Nepali, Bangla, Sinhala, Arabic and Hebrew, Malay, Malagash. Of course, I'm Greek. Of course, I know some English. My Spanish is essentially native level. I forget what else you remind me, I'll tell you. Helen was the perfect person to ask about blah, blah, blahs around the globe. We focused on times when these sayings are used to express impatience.

For example, something like, blah, blah, blah, I get it, I get it, hurry up already. Somebody might say, you know, in Hebrew, they may say, kvar, kvar, it's already done it. In Greek, we can say, ade, ade, ade, finish. Or, he was saying, he was saying, he was saying. And, Sinhalese, you can say something like whatever somebody said. In the Bali, same thing. It became boring. So you can say, In Portuguese, they can say something like, There it goes again. Et cetera.

In French, I hear the word ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Here's a similar phrase from the YouTube channel Learn French with Georges. So repeat after me. Patati patata patati. So what is this? Patati patata it means etc. In Hindi, something to say of the sort would be, which interestingly, it's Arabic. In Russian, they may say blah, blah, blah. Frankly, I asked a few people because this is the stuff that isn't found in dictionaries. You know, Malay, come on, hurry up.

In Albanian, scum assume. There's nothing more to say. Please, please. In Spanish, etc, etc. What we see overall. Either you use some word like, he was saying, he was saying, hurry up, come on, get done. Or you imitate the sound onomatopoeia.

Helen was sort of the opposite opinion to me. She said that they're not found in dictionaries. And I said, you know, is that a shame? Should we be writing these down? And she was kind of like, it doesn't really matter. You pick it up. You hear people talk and you pick it up. Whereas I think. I just love a bit of knowledge. I love to know where things came from and trace things through time and have them recorded. I just think it's always cool to...

Zoom into patterns of linguistics and not only linguistics, but just patterns of everything. I think it's easy to gloss over. humanity or how it's being filtered through our little devices but you can learn a lot through very specific nerdy things like this about how all humans speak to each other and how that nuance in each language means a slightly different version of a similar thing.

And it's interesting, I suppose, to think about languages that might not have it and that might indicate that they actually are better listeners and that there might be an actual slower pace of life somewhere out there because, you know, people are just going da-da-da-da-da, blah-blah-blah-blah, yadda-yadda.

and they're actually bothering to say everything. Well, I grew up in a really rural area, you know, pre-internet. And when I think back of grandparents or older people even now speaking, there's not a whole lot of filler words. I'd have to... consciously think about it. But I do suspect that in storytelling and very verbal listening environments, that there's probably a culture of allowing more space.

If someone doesn't have the words right away, it is still a sign of love to give them the space to try and work out what they're trying to communicate. Of course, there's nothing wrong with saying blah, blah, blah or da-da-da-da-da-da-da when you're trying to skip over the unimportant parts of a story. After all, words and phrases develop because we find them useful. But from time to time...

we might all benefit from slowing down and giving ourselves space to tell the full story. One of the things that I would encourage people to practice is when you do hear someone else who is very fast and breathless and using all these filler words. When they finish a thought, I always count to three or five to make sure that they know that I'm listening and they can also slow down.

I'm getting into the weeds right now. This probably isn't even about this show. No, I love that. Something I think about. And I think it is about this show. And I think that's why these topics are so interesting. Because we start with something like, oh, I noticed my friend said da-da-da-da-da-da when she was telling me.

me a story and then we end up in a conversation about active listening and communicating with each other which is essentially what this is you know it is maybe something that some people don't think is worth thinking about or aren't necessarily curious about but when you do get a bit curious and you do chat about it for a while this is where we end up which I love yeah I find it fascinating

20,000 Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of DeFacto Sound. To hear more, follow DeFacto Sound on Instagram. This episode was written and produced by Amelia Tate. And Casey Emmerling. With help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt. And Joel Boyer. Thanks to our guests, Paul Saka and Helena Bodzi. To learn more about their work, follow the links in the show notes. I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.