When is a word not a word? This rather unusual question was thrown at me by my friend Shanta. She and her friend had been playing the word-game, “scrabble”. It had proceeded smoothly enough until her friend made a move by adding “o” to “h”. Shanta objected. “Oh” she maintained was not admissible, it was an interjection. Her friend countered by asking if it appeared in the dictionary. It did. Then there was no reason why it could not be used.

The argument continued. It spelt the end of the game and the start of a debate. Now Shanta wanted me to be arbiter. Sensing pitfalls ahead, I hedged. There are books, I informed Shanta, which listed all permissible words. Ever the language purist, Shanta shrugged her shoulders. Glaring at me, she said pointedly, “Would you choose “yeah” or “yah”? Or perhaps you prefer “yaa”. I did think you were a lover of the language.”With that she flounced off. Not surprisingly, this left me pondering.

I picked up the dictionary. “Oh”, it said, is an interjection expressing surprise, fear etc. But was it a word? There was no reference to this. I turned next to Nesfield, the venerable authority on grammar. It pronounced, “Properly speaking, an interjection is not a Part of Speech, since it has no grammatical connection with any other word or words in the sentence”.
So Shanta was right. Or was she?

The more I thought about it, the more I felt that these words or sounds succeed in conveying meaning instantly and very clearly. “Ah” denotes “understanding”, “ouch” is without doubt an expression of pain and “tche” points to disapproval. One could quote many more examples.
Last but not least, children use it and comprehend it with ease. If the whole work of words is to convey sense, then these sounds do it clearly and completely.