Art by Jon McCormack
“Blah, blah, blah” and “yada, yada, yada” have had plenty written about them. But there’s a longtime cousin of these phrases that’s much less understood. We use it all the time, yet it’s not in the dictionary. It’s not even Google-able. In this episode, we investigate the linguistic mysteries of the Five Dah Phenomenon. Featuring linguist & philosopher Paul Saka, and psychologist Helen Abadzi.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Howard Harper-Barnes - Pizzicato Dance
Howard Harper Barnes - Do You Trust This
Joseph C Smith - Smiles
Arthur Benson - A Spotless Mind
Arthur Benson - The Neighbor’s Doghouse
Arthur Benson - A Lovely, Lonely Day
Arthur Benson - Climbing the Fence
Arthur Benson - Lend a Clumsy Hand
Jerry Lacey - Wishing Tree
Spectacles Wallet and Watch - Watch Her Go + Want to Love It
Sarah, the Illstrumentalist - Tropic-fi
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View Transcript ▶︎
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. I'm Dallas Taylor.
[Music in: Howard Harper-Barnes - Pizzicato Dance]
Well, hello there Twenty Thousand Hertz producer Amelia Tait.
Amelia: 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 gonna get a lot better real quick.
Amelia: Nice, nice. And do you know what we're talking about today?
I know we're talking about blah, blah, blah...
Amelia: 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."
Amelia: 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."
Amelia: “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 Yada Yada.”
[clip: Seinfeld]
Amelia: 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 uh, 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."
Amelia: Right.
[music in: Joseph C Smith - Smiles]
Amelia: 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 & War." Here's a quote.
Howard Vincent O’Brein: Colonel H here today... Pulled old blah about “service,” “doing one’s bit,” et cetera.
Amelia: As for “yada yada,” comedian Lenny Bruce popularized the phrase in his performances in the 1960s.
[Lenny Bruce clip]
Amelia: Since then, "yada, yada, yada" and "blah, blah, blah" have had plenty written about them. They're Google-able, they're spell-able, and there have been articles written about their origins.
[music in - Arthur Benson - A Spotless Mind]
Amelia: 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 is, let me clear my throat. Sorry, I need to get it right because there's five.
Amelia: It is “Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” No, hang on. So I'm telling a story. “Me and Dallas are chatting, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” Do you hear what I'm saying? Like when you say five...
“Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah?” Dah dah dah dah dah. Dah dah dah dah dah!
Amelia: Dah dah dah dah dah. Dah dah dah dah dah.
Amelia: Dah dah dah dah dah.
That’s a thing—No, I've never heard that before in conversation.
Amelia: 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."
Amelia: Okay, maybe some examples will help. Here are some dahs in the fantasy cartoon Adventure Time:
[clip: Adventure Time, S7E23]
Amelia: And here's a clip from the film Florence Foster Jenkins, where Meryl Streep shows a newspaper review to Hugh Grant.
[clip: Florence Foster Jenkins]
Amelia: These dahs 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:
[clip: Scorpion clip, S1E1]
Amelia: 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:
[clip: W1A]
Amelia: 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, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, the episode will be out in a few months.”
Amelia: See there, I managed to get the intonation right.
Maybe I have. “Dah dah dah dah dah dah.”
Amelia: “Dah dah dah dah dah.”
It’s really fun, because it seems like you can really put any drum cadence you want with it. You know, “dah dah dah dah dah… Dah dah dah dah dah… Dah dah dah dah dah dah!”
Amelia: Yeah, it is quite musical. You can mix up the intonation and often it's five dah's, sometimes it's three dah's, like “dah, dah, dah.” Sometimes it's four.
Amelia: Here, for example, are three dahs followed by four dahs in the reality TV show The Real L Word:
[clip: The Real L Word]
Amelia: But five does seem to be the magic number. Like here, in the film The Age of Stupid:
[clip: The Age of Stupid]
[music in: Arthur Benson - The Neighbor’s Doghouse]
Amelia: 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 “dah” with an A? Is there a H on the end? Is it even just kind of like the letter D by itself, like “D-d-d-d-d?”
Is there any sort of official spelling, or can we just make it up?
Amelia: So I think we can make it up.
Ooh, I like that!
Amelia: 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.
Amelia: Okay. Maybe we should christen it, like “The Five Dah” or “The Five Dah Phenomenon” or something.
Amelia: But what exactly are the five dahs? What do they mean and where do they come from? Why do we use them but never acknowledge them?
Amelia: 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.
Right.
Amelia: But thankfully, one expert did get what I meant.
Paul: You approached me with your email and gave this example, and I thought, "Yeah, this sounds like something I probably heard before."
[music in - Arthur Benson - A Lovely, Lonely Day]
Paul: My name is Paul Saka. I teach at the University of Texas, and I have a PhD in linguistics, and a PhD in philosophy.
Amelia: In 2017, Paul published a paper entitled, "Blah, Blah, Blah: Quasi-Quotation and Unquotation." He explained to me exactly what quasi-quotation is...
Paul: When you report what someone else has said, you can do it with different reasons in mind, 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."
Paul: 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.
Paul: 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.
Amelia: “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:
[clip: Family Guy]
Paul: It's not just “blah, blah, blah,” there are other, I call them “devices” of quasi-quotation.
Amelia: One example is “so-and-so,” and another is “such-and-such.” Here's some narration from the movie Magnolia.
[clip: Magnolia]
Amelia: And of course, there's “Yada, yada, yada.” Here’s a scene from Frasier showing what Eddie the dog hears when the humans talk.
[clip: Frasier - Death and the Dog]
Amelia: But where exactly do these nonsensical-sounding terms come from?
Paul: These words don't occur out of nothing. The first, "Yada, yada, yada" was Lenny Bruce, but looking a bit earlier in the 1940s, the OED reports, "Yatata, yatata, yatata."
Amelia: In the 1947 musical Allegro, there’s a song called “Yatata Yatata Yatata” that mocks meaningless conversation. You can hear here how the phrase is a pretty perfect onomatopoeia of a chatty room:
[clip: Allegro “Yatata Yatata Yatata”]
Paul: And you can see how "Yatata, yatata, yatata" 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 yatter." And "yatter" is comparatively recent. It is conjectured that it's a blend of "to yak” or "yammer," and to "chatter."
Amelia: Similarly, "blah blah blah" likely evolved from the word "blabber," which then got shortened to "blab," and eventually just "blah."
[music in: Howard Harper Barnes - Do You Trust This]
Paul: 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 "yatter" 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. [SFX: Glitching sound] And these brain glitches are one source of linguistic change.
Amelia: It turns out, it is pretty easy for these brain glitches to spread from person to person.
Paul: I saw an estimate that "yada yada yada" makes up less than one in one hundred million words. So you statistically need to hear more than a hundred million words before you ever run across "yada yada yada."
Paul: Yet the human mind is genetically programmed to be a kind of sponge for vocabulary. [SFX: sponge sucking] 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 reasonable hypothesis as to what the term means.
Amelia: 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 “dah, dah, dah, dah, dah-y” naturally.
Amelia: Okay.
But all of my public speaking books and gurus say the opposite.
[music in: Jerry Lacey - Wishing Tree]
Amelia: Regardless of whether we should "yada," "blah," and "dah," the simple fact is that many of us do. But if we can trace "blah" to 1918 and "yada" to the 1940s, where on earth did "dah dah dah dah dah" come from?
Amelia: That's coming up, after the break.
MIDROLL
[Musical Sting from Jerry Lacey - Wishing Tree] Amelia: In the English language, there are a variety of terms that essentially mean "etcetera." Here's Lisa Simpson demonstrating one:
[clip: The Simpsons]
Amelia: And here's Louise Belcher with another:
[clip: Bob’s Burgers]
[music in - Arthur Benson - Climbing the Fence]
Amelia: But there's another, similar phrase that gets a lot less attention, and that's the humble "dah." It comes in threes:
Voice 1: Dah dah dah.
Amelia: And fours:
Voice 2: Dah dah dah dah.
Amelia: But very often, you hear five dahs in a row. Here they are in a YouTube video from the Insider Food channel:
[Insider Food clip]
Amelia: But sometimes, you get even more. Here's Pharell Williams with seven dahs.
[clip: Pharell Williams]
Amelia: Here's philosopher Dan Dennett, with eight.
[clip: Dan Dennett]
Amelia: And here's former governor and pro wrestler Jesse Ventura with a whopping nine dahs.
[clip: Jesse Ventura]
Amelia: As far as I can tell, no one has yet explained where "dah" came from.
Paul: Yes, so I wrote and published a big article which looks at “blah, blah, blah,” and “yada, yada, yada,” and it never occurred to me to talk about “dah, dah, dah.”
Amelia: But Paul does have a few theories. First, he told me that in Morse Code, the dots and dashes are colloquially called “dits and das.”
[SFX: Morse code spelling “D-A-H”]
Amelia: So potentially, the word "dah" spread from there.
Paul: 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.”
Amelia: Another possibility is that "dah" 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:
[clip: Mamma Mia]
Paul: “Dah” might come from “dot” if somehow that final t gets reduced down to nothing.
Amelia: I mean, when I came to you, I called it a verbal ellipsis. Do you think that that's a fair thing to call a “dah dah dah dah dah?” Could I christen it that?
Paul: 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 “dah, dah, dah” might often appear, you know, within a set of three.
Amelia: Repeating it more times - say, five - just adds that extra bit of emphasis, and even a sense of melody, which linguists call "prosody".
[Dah Dah Dah Dah Dah with Piano]
Paul: One thought that did occur to me is that consonants in English, such as the D and T, are very frequently used for non-lexical purposes.
Amelia: Coronal consonants are sounds we make when our tongue curves upwards and touches the spot behind our front teeth. So “d-d-d-d-d,” and “t-t-t-t-t” [pronounce as letter sounds]
Paul: It occurs a lot in music, right? The Police have a song, “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.” [clip: The Police - De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da]
Amelia: And then there’s “Tom’s Diner,” by Suzanne Vega.
[clip: Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner]
Paul: We also find it in “Zip a Dee Doo Da.”
[clip: James Baskett - Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah]
Paul: 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 dee doo."
Amelia: I've also noticed that people use the letter D when interrupting someone. Here's a scene from the film Big Fat Liar:
[clip: Big Fat Liar]
Amelia: 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.
[clip: Happy Endings]
Paul: 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 favored.
Amelia: But why do we prefer D? It might just be because it's an easier sound to make.
Paul: 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.
[clip: Mungo Jerry - In the Summertime]
Paul: 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.
Amelia: In other words, it's most likely some combination of several of these factors.
[Music in - Arthur Benson - Lend a Clumsy Hand]
Amelia: So English speakers favor "dahs,” and we're also partial to some "blahs" and some "yadas.” But what do people from other parts of the world use to convey the same meaning?
Helen Abadzi: 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, Malagasy, 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.
Amelia: 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!"
Helen Abadzi: And 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, "Eleia, eleia, eleia, eleia," "He was saying, he was saying, he was saying..." In Sinhalese, you can say something like, "Whatever somebody said," "kawurukiyanua." In Nepali, same thing, "It became boring," so you can say, "Bhagutugudio." In Portuguese, they can say something like, "Por aí, vá," "There it goes again" "Et cetera." In French, I hear the word "Ta ta ta ta ta.”
Amelia: Here’s a similar phrase from the YouTube channel Learn French with Georges:
[clip: Learn French with Georges]
Helen Abadzi: in Hindi something to say of the sort would be "Vagairah, vagairah," "et cetera, et cetera," which, interestingly, it's Arabic, "vagairuha." 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. In Malay, "Cepatlah," "Come on, hurry up." In Albanian, "Skamishum," "There's nothing more to say. Please, please." In Spanish, "Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera," y "así va exclusivamente" "Ya," para "Ya! Ya! Se acabó, por favor!" In German, we hear like, "Laber, laber, laber," which you hear again, the sound of "laber, laber, laber."
Amelia: I have to say my favorite's gotta be the German, right? “Glubber, glubber glubber.”
I wrote that down. I don't know if I could say it. “Labak, labak, labak?” Is that it?
Amelia: It's just perfect.
[music in - Spectacles Wallet and Watch - Watch Her Go + Want to Love It]
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.
Amelia: 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 aren't just going “dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada.” 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, in 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.
Amelia: Of course, there's nothing wrong with saying "blah, blah, blah" or "dah, dah, dah, dah, dah" 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,
Amelia: No, I love that! …but something I think about.
Amelia: 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 ‘dah dah dah dah dah dah’ when she was telling 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.
[Music out into music in: Sarah, the Illstrumentalist - Tropic-fi]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. To hear more, follow Defacto Sound on Instagram.
Amelia: This episode was written and produced by Amelia Tait.
Other Voices: And Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt and Joel Boyter.
Thanks to our guests, Paul Saka and Helen Abadzi. To learn more about their work, follow the links in the show notes.
I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.
