It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell, for example, advocated answering with Ahoy!, while Thomas Edison argued for Hello. As linguist Gretchen McCulloch says in her excellent new book Because Internet, this disagreement is worth remembering when we think about how other forms of greeting are evolving. Today older speakers of English might hesitate to greet someone with hey, but younger people tend to be perfectly comfortable with it. This is part of a complete episode.
More from this show
What makes a great first line of a book? How do the best authors put together an initial sentence that draws you in and makes you want to read more? We’re talking about the openings of such novels as George Orwell’s 1984...
To slip someone a mickey means to doctor a drink and give it to an unwitting recipient. The phrase goes back to Mickey Finn of the Lone Star Saloon in Chicago, who in the late 19th century was notorious for drugging certain customers and relieving...