mental or physical anguish. Meyer didn’t invent that word, but he did coin yoink, the familiar phrase
that Simpsons characters utter when they snatch an item from another character’s hands. In 2007, the
humor magazine Cracked ran a feature on the top words created by The Simpsons. Making the list
were classics like cromulent (describing something that’s fine, acceptable, or illegitimately
legitimate) and tomacco (a crossbreed of tomato and tobacco made by Homer, first suggested in a
1959 Scientific American piece, and actually crossbred in 2003 by a Simpsons fan named Rob
Bauer). But the top invented word on the list was meh, the expression of pure indifference that
debuted in the sixth season of the show. In one episode, Marge Simpson is fascinated by a weaving
loom at a Renaissance Fair, having studied weaving in high school. She weaves a message: “Hi Bart,
I am weaving on a loom.” Bart’s response: “meh.” Six years later, an episode aired in which Lisa
Simpson actually spells out the word.
Meh has appeared in numerous dictionaries, from Macmillan (“used for showing that you do not
care what happens or that you are not particularly interested in something”) to Dictionary.com (“an
expression of boredom or apathy”) to Collins English Dictionary (“an interjection to suggest
indifference or boredom—or as an adjective to say something is mediocre or a person is
unimpressed”). Several years ago, George Meyer was caught by surprise when a Simpsons writer
shared a memory with him about the episode in which meh first appeared. “He reminded me I had
worked on that episode, and he thought I came up with the word meh. I didn’t remember it.” When I
asked Tim Long who created meh, he was pretty confident it was George Meyer. “I’m almost sure he
invented meh. It’s everywhere—most people don’t even realize it started with The Simpsons.”
Eventually, conversations with writers jogged Meyer’s memory. “I was trying to think of a word that
would be the easiest word to say with minimal effort—just a parting of the lips and air would come
out.”
Why didn’t Meyer have a better memory of his contributions? As a giver, his focus was on
achieving a collective result that entertained others, not on claiming personal responsibility for that
result. He would suggest as many lines, jokes, and words as possible, letting others run with them and
incorporate them into their scripts. His attention centered on improving the overall quality of the
script, rather than on tracking who was responsible for it. “A lot of the stuff is just like a basketball
assist. When somebody would say, ‘George, that was yours,’ I genuinely did not know,” Meyer says.
“I tended to not be able to remember the stuff that I had done, so I wasn’t always saying when I did
this and that. I was saying when we did this and that. I think it’s good to get into the habit of doing
that.”
Research shows that it’s not terribly difficult for matchers and takers to develop this habit. Recall
that the responsibility bias occurs because we have more information about our own contributions
than others’. The key to balancing our responsibility judgments is to focus our attention on what others
have contributed. All you need to do is make a list of what your partner contributes before you
estimate your own contribution. Studies indicate that when employees think about how much help they
receive from their bosses before thinking about how much they contribute to their bosses, their
estimates of their bosses’ contributions double, from under 17 percent to over 33 percent. Bring
together a work group of three to six people and ask each member to estimate the percentage of the
total work that he or she does. Add up their estimates, and the average total is over 140 percent. Ask
them to reflect on each member’s contributions before their own, and the average total drops to 123
percent.
michael s
(Michael S)
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