Connie wrote to ask if the word blah was from Spanish.

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More specifically, here’s what she said:

“I was wondering about the similarity of the sound of the word/expression “blah-blah-blah”, meaning “talking”, and the Spanish verb “hablar” or (“habla” in the second person), meaning “to speak”. I wonder if our somewhat rude expression for talk of little importance somehow came from the Spanish language.”

This put me in mind of the word barbarian which some etymologies suggest is a word that came from Greek roots which developed  supposedly because the Greeks thought other nations were less sophisticated and besides everything they said sounded like bar-bar-bar.

The word blah has nowhere near as long a pedigree.

None of the dictionaries I looked at linked it to Spanish.

What I found most surprising was that the word only dates back to 1918.

Even more recent is the fact that the blahs only arose in 1969. And here I was thinking that occasionally having the blahs was a basic human condition going back thousands of years.

That first 1918 citation is from a book called Wine, Women and War – A Diary of Disillusionment.

The author Howard Vincent O’Brien writes about his experience in the First World War and seems to use the word blah quite a few times.

He meant “talk” but one wonders if he had the blahs since his subtitle mentions disillusionment and he published the book anonymously.

O’Brien was also a Chicago newspaper columnist writing a longstanding piece called All Things Considered.

His Wine, Women and War has a few pithy observations.

As well as asserting—while still in it—that World War I would not be the war to end all wars he makes the following notes during a train ride.

“Left Paris 7:30. International mélange in compartment. Jap, silent, and reading. East Indian, silent – doing nothing. Englishman who kept opening window. Frenchman who kept closing it. Serb and Swiss. … Common language – English.”