Telephone Greetings

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi, this is Dale Hobson from Potsdam, New York.

Hi, Dale.

Thanks for having me on the show.

Hi, Dale. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Grant. Thank you.

What can we help you with?

Well, I was reading Robert Krolwich’s science blog at NPR, Krolwich Wonders, and he was saying that the standard greeting in English, hello, is actually kind of a new term. It first shows up in print in the 1830s, and it really doesn’t get popular until the last part of the 19th century, when the Edison Telephone Company recommended it as a standard greeting for answering the telephone.

At the same time, Alexander Graham Bell was recommending that we use Ahoy to answer the phone, and I’m just as glad that that didn’t catch on.

Ahoy, you have A Way with Words.

Yes.

Yeah, you’re right, you’re right. I tend to save that for September 19th, which is National Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Good point.

So, hello appeared on the scene in the 1830s, and I know where you’re heading with this. What did people say before?

Exactly. You know, if Thomas Jefferson or Shakespeare or Chaucer walked into a bar, how would they greet the bartender? They just slammed their hand on the table and said, give me a drink.

This sounds like the beginning of a joke.

Ahoy!

Ahoy!

Two shots of rye.

So, you know, I was looking back to sort of backwaters of English speakers, and I thought, like, in the Old West, people said, howdy, you know, some version of how do you do, howdy doody. And I think of, well, I guess Australia would probably consider itself a backwater, but g’day.

G’day.

But really, I have no idea.

Yeah, it is really interesting to think about that moment in history when hello really emerged on the scene. But it wasn’t this big breakthrough that was heralded in the newspapers where people were astonished at this new word that appeared. It was a gradual transition from earlier forms.

Right. But, I mean, the idea of having to answer a telephone and incorporating this new technology, what are we going to say? It wasn’t just that. Because previously, you might shout across a valley, right? Hello. Hey, Martha, right?

Right.

Or you might meet somebody face to face. How are you, Martha? How do you do? Or even earlier, centuries earlier. Hail Martha, right? But now we have this strange circumstance where you were greeting someone who was both present and far away.

Yeah. It’s the same, at the same time. It required a new kind of greeting, right?

Yeah. I think Krolwich gets a little bit of this. We’ll link to his blog. He’s always entertaining. I think he gets into this a little bit, but that’s the crux of it is why we need it. Why couldn’t you just have said, hail, or how do you do, or howdy?

Can you hear me now?

Yeah, and it didn’t stop people from saying it because you, Dale, you hit upon it. The earlier forms were hail is recorded. Shakespeare records it. It goes back centuries. You just say hail. And then later it became a question genuinely or just as a matter of form about someone’s health. How are you? Corrupted to how do you do or how do you do or so forth and all the different dialects and various older English forms of saying that, right? But it’s generally how we greeted people. It’s pretty straightforward stuff. There’s no secret hidden word back there that people said that we’ve forgotten.

Yeah, and it’s kind of hard to research, too, because it’s such an everyday kind of thing. It’s not something that you see in recorded.

Yeah.

But don’t forget, too, that even today, we still greet people with more than hello.

Exactly. There are lots of different things. Good morning, Martha. How are you? Good morrow.

Good morrow.

We would say good night or good day. We might bid someone good day as a parting, but we might have previously said good day as a greeting.

Or I say hey.

Yeah, hey. Which is a direct descendant from these Scandinavian slash Germanic languages. So we have all this shared history, a lot of different ways to greet each other, very finely nuanced, and the rise of hello is interesting, but it stems from holo with a U instead of an E, or holo with an A instead of an E.

Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s interesting that we had to all agree on what that would be, although it’s different in different languages. I mean, you pick up the phone in some countries and you say pronto, the equivalent of ready.

Or mushy-mushy.

Right, in Japan.

Right.

So we’ve kind of been all over the map here.

Did that help?

That helps. I hadn’t realized that it was so recent. And it never occurred to me to wonder what people actually said in the language that I use every day.

Yeah, I’m trying to think what else we see fossilized. Like Shakespeare, what ho? You know, I mean, I think there were lots of different kinds of things, as Grant said.

What ho?

I love it.

I love it.

Well, God be with you.

Right. Or as Alexander Graham Bell recommended in signing off from the telephone, he said, say, that is all.

Oh, really? Okay. Nice. Nice. Well, Dale.

That’s the way it is. All right. Thanks.

That is all.

Thanks, Dale.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

And so it goes. 877-929-9673. Or you can send us email to words@waywordradio.org.