Ahoy vs. Hello

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

When the telephone was invented in the mid-1800s, people weren’t sure how best to start or end conversations on these newfangled devices.

If you wanted to greet someone in person in those days, the polite thing to do would be to say something like, good morning, doctor, or good morning, Mrs. Jones.

But when a phone rang, you didn’t know the identity of the person calling, or maybe even the time of day where they were.

So what were you supposed to say?

Alexander Graham Bell suggested answering with, ahoy! And Thomas Edison lobbied for hello.

And it’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the solution for this was still unsettled.

And in fact, early phone books included instructions that suggested answering with, a firm and cheery holoa, or what is wanted.

And they recommended ending phone conversations with, that is all.

Hello eventually caught on, of course, but it didn’t happen right away.

And in fact, some people thought that hello smacked of a superior addressing an inferior, the kind of thing you’d say to summon somebody.

And as late as the 1940s, etiquette books still advised against using hello as a polite greeting, whether on the phone or off.

Linguist Gretchen McCulloch says that this disagreement is worth remembering when we think of how other forms of greeting are evolving as we use more and more electronic communication.

For example, the term, hey, young people tend to be fine with greeting each other that way.

I’m fine with it.

But there’s still some older people who bristle if you address them with, hey.

And there’s also this lingering generation gap around technological interruptions.

And in her book, Because Internet, McCulloch writes, younger people find that responding to a text message in the company of others is reasonable because you can integrate it into the pauses of the conversation.

But unplanned phone calls are a gross interruption because they demand your attention instantly, completely, and unpredictably.

And on the other hand, older people are perfectly happy to interrupt or be interrupted by a voice call because they’re unexpected and therefore urgent.

But find the sight of someone texting an imposition, precisely because you could have put it off until after the conversation entirely.

And she offers some helpful advice for navigating all this that I think we can all take.

She describes it as a call to humility when we’re thinking about language.

She says, if conversational norms are always in flux and different at the same time among different people, let’s not be over hasty to judge.

Let’s ask clarifying questions about what other people mean rather than rushing to conclusions.

Let’s assume that communicative practices, which baffle us, do have genuine important meaning for the people who use them.

We don’t create truly successful communication by winning at conversational norms.

We create successful communication when all parties help each other win.

Oh, she’s Gretchen. Right?

She’s so fantastic.

It’s a manifesto for our show, right?

It is. It’s very similar to what you and I have been saying because we’re part of the larger linguistic community.

But Gretchen has this fantastic way with words.

She does.

Phrasing what is widely understood in sociolinguistics in a way that you can use it and apply it to your daily language.

Yeah, great example.

So the book is Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch. We both highly recommend it.

And we’d love to talk with you if you’ve read the book and have comments about it or you want to talk with us about any other aspect of language.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send your thoughts and email to words@waywordradio.org.