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At first I thought "wallah!" was a phonetic misspelling of voilà http://www.thefreedictionary.com/voila http://www.thefreedictionary.com/voila , but now I see i
by 6ren 15y ago
At first I thought "wallah!" was a phonetic misspelling of voilà http://www.thefreedictionary.com/voila http://www.thefreedictionary.com/voila , but now I see it apparently is an arabic oath meaning "by Allah!" http://www.google.com.au/search?q=wallah http://www.google.com.au/search?q=wallah (though the wikipedia article suspiciously cites no sources... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallah_(Arabic) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallah_(Arabic) )
- abdulhaq 15y agowallah does indeed mean 'By God!' in arabic but it's used as an assertion of veracity. In this context the poster obviously meant to say voila and like you I've also seen this wallah variation of it creeping in recently.
- 6ren 15y agoRetro-validation appeals to me, so it could be interpreted as: and - truly, I swear by God I am not making this up - I was granted a ticket with that exit row seat In English, it's an old-fashioned idiom that a Robert Louis Stevenson character might have used. But English-speakers tend not to swear by God much these days - indeed, "swearing" usually means profanity.
- MichaelApproved 15y agoMy parents are Middle Eastern Jews from Iran and Iraq and my understanding of their use of wallah is to mean "for real?" or "surprisingly so!"
- abdulhaq 15y agoYes it means that too but deriving from the sense I mentioned, i.e. asking if the person making the assertion would swear to it 'by God'.
- biot 15y agoThe French pronunciation of voila is akin to "fwalla", with the f/v sound being relatively subtle. At any rate it's not as amusing as misspelling it as viola.