Yadda Yadda Yadda

"Et cetera" in the vernacular.

A Seinfeld episode featured this phrase (see http://www.pkmeco.com/seinfeld/yada.htm ), but although sometimes accredited as a "Seinfeld" dialect, this catch phrase has been around for an eternity, perhaps longer.

People have been using this phrase for millennia. Cave men scratched it into stone walls. Seinfeld is just the latest incarnation.

Now how can I believe a statement which ends with such a disclaimer?

Not to be confused with Yabba-dabba-doo; a word used by Fred Flintstone to express his glee at making up with his neighbours for the nth time.

Origin: Seinfeld (with certainty) borrowed it from Lenny Bruce, who used it in t he early 1960s. Prior to that its origins are misty (it is not literal Yiddish, for instance, although it has been claimed to be a mutation of Yiddish). http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/myadda.html, among other discussions.

Cullen Murphy, managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, had an interesting discussion on http://slate.msn.com/id/3167/. Excerpt:

"Terms such as yadda yadda yadda and blah blah blah have a special utility when the speaker's audience can accurately fill in the blanks--when the terms act not as synonyms for "generic talk" but as command keys, cued to circumstance, that can designate specific information. In other words, what yadda yadda yadda can convey is something like: "You and I know all the points that would ordinarily be inserted at this place in the conversation, so let's just skip it and move on."

"This usage points to yadda yadda yadda's larger social significance: It suggests that an ever-larger percentage of the content of everyday communication can be correctly anticipated--probably owing in part to the sheer repetition of words and arguments in the various public media. I am not aware of any studies comparing the number of words an average person could expect to hear spoken in a typical day 500 years ago vs. the number that can be heard now, but the increase surely is vast. If a politician were to say today that he opposes abortion except when yadda yadda yadda, we would all know what he means, and we would know what was meant if, after an arrest, a police officer pulled out a card and just said yadda yadda yadda. Adults have always been struck by how much teen-age communication can seemingly be accomplished by emitting one of perhaps half a dozen subverbal phonemes, and it will be instructive to watch as something along these same lines spreads to the general population."

Also, the ... operator in PerlSix.

CategoryIdiom