So I was talking to a friend of mine and I said, “how are things?”

And he said, “neither here nor there.” 

And then we continued our conversation as if he had just not said something strange.

It was strange in two ways.

First “neither here nor there” is supposed to mean “unimportant” or “irrelevant” as in “Whether you come or go is neither here nor there” or “with regard to your salvation, your good intentions are neither here nor there.”

Second, his answer was really a borrowing from Yiddish, “nisht ahin un nisht aher” or perhaps a use to mean “somewhere in the middle between extremes”.

So let’s assume he was answering as if he was trying to say something like “fair to middlin’”.  But really, I had asked him HOW things were, not WHERE.

Things are fine, or ok or not so good.  That’s HOW they are.  But if they are neither here nor there then the question I should have asked was, “where are things?” and then, a perfectly logical answer would be the one he gave.

Except even that bothered me regardless of usage, because if things are neither here nor there, then where are they?  Somewhere else.  But where is that?  We may not know where the things are.  The things, whatever they are, may now be lost.  It is clear we have a cause for concern. 

Now in English we have a problem because if things are not ‘here’, they have be somewhere ‘there’.  Because everyplace that is not ’there’ is actually ‘here’ and vice versa.  Halfway between here and there is still there - unless it is here.

True, there are many individual ‘theres’ and if you asked me whether something was in a particular ‘there’ that you point at, I might say, ‘no’.  But eventually, if things were not here, wouldn’t there be at least one specific ‘there’ where those things were? 

I decided that if things were neither here nor there, they would have to be someplace imaginary, like the square root of minus 1, remember?  But, actually, if they are someplace imaginary, they are somewhere that is not here or, in other words, they are in some ‘there’.  So the best I can do for a logical answer to the question “how are things” or as a phrase meaning “unimportant”, is, “not here”  or “nowhere”.

In Yiddish, the similar answer to how are things is, “nisht ahin (towards there) un nisht aher (towards here).”  This actually makes much more sense because these two words are directional.  So in Yiddish when you give this answer you are saying that things are not moving away from you, nor are they moving towards you.  This means they are stationary, that is, unchanged.  And that is a logical answer to the question, “how are things?” - “unchanged” or not moving in any direction.

So, in the future, if someone asks you in English, “how are things?” and you have the urge to answer “neither here nor there”, remember to answer correctly, “neither moving away from me nor towards me.”  Otherwise you will be obliged to avoid your friends and when they call and ask, “how are things?” you will just have to say, ”not here” and hang up.