Blah Blah Blah and Yada Yada

Saying "blah blah blah" (it seems to be said in threes) or "yada yada" (in twos and threes) sounds like total nonsense, but here we want to know more.

If you’re telling a long-winded story or giving confusing directions, someone might say "blah blah blah.”  “Blah” functions as a nothing word. “Blah” as a noun is defined as “silly or pretentious nonsense.” As an adjective, it means “dull and unattractive," as in "What a blah day."

It’s a 20th-century word, and its earliest written accounts in the Oxford English Dictionary come from a 1918 diary. It may have come from the French word blasé, which has been carried over into English, meaning “apathetic to pleasure or life, especially as a result of excessive indulgence or enjoyment.” If you’re feeling blah or blasé about something in your life, it may be because it’s boring or repetitive. 

You might hear someone say that they "have the blahs,” which is a colloquial phrase for mild depression. Punk rocker Iggy Pop released an album called “Blah-Blah-Blah,”and the title track “Blah-Blah-Blah” spoke to disaffection with the world.

I have also heard people use this phrase as a sentence ending, meaning a kind boring et cetera. "We wanted to go to dinner, couldn't decide on a place, stayed home and blah, blah, blah."

That last usage makes me think of "yada yada," which is most closely associated with an episode of the TV series Seinfeld. George's new girlfriend Marcy, likes to say "yada yada yada" to shorten her stories. Marcy tells him that her ex-boyfriend had visited her the night before, "and yada yada yada, I'm really tired today." That leaves the tadas up to interpretation. Did March have sex with her ex?

While Seinfeld popularized the phrase in the 1997 episode "The Yada Yada," it definitely did not invent it. Its linguistic roots are generally agreed to be that "yada yada" is an onomatopoeic evolution of the British word "yatter," which means to talk pointlessly or at length. This likely stems from the older word "chatter." By the 1940s and 50s, variations like "yatter-yatter" or "yaddega-yaddega" were appearing in American slang and comedy routines to mimic the sound of someone droning on.

1940s and 0s Vaudeville comedians often used "yadda yadda" or "yatata yatata" as a "button" for a joke—a way to signal that a character was talking too much without the comedian having to write actual dialogue for them.

It was used in a 1980 commercial for Federal Express, and it appeared in the 1989 film Parenthood, where a character says, "Then it's yada yada yada, and you're out the door."

There is often a misconception that "yada yada" is a Yiddish phrase. While it sounds phonetically similar to many Yiddish expressions and was frequently used by Jewish comedians in the Borscht Belt circuit, it is not actually a Yiddish word. Its popularity in New York-centric comedy helped create that association. The Seinfeld writers reportedly picked up the phrase because it was a common "filler" used by people in the industry when they were pitching scripts and didn't want to explain every minor plot point.