Skip to main content

Hello

Image
By




One of the more common greetings you likely use in everyday English is probably not as old as you might think.  It was only around the 1880s when we started to use the word hello to greet others.  Hello was just a variation on now-archaic greetings like halloo, hullo and holla, among others.  Hello was originally an Americanism, and was considered informal, though inoffensive, and it soon found a specific niche.  The telephone had been invented in 1876, and since this was a new way of communicating, many felt that it needed a specific greeting.  Alexander Graham Bell, who held the patent for the telephone and was starting to set up telephone systems, originally promoted ahoy as a telephone greeting.  It makes sense, since that’s the word you use to call to others across long distances.  Ahoy has nautical associations, since sailors would frequently have to call out from ship to ship, but the word was often used on land, as well.  However, despite Mr. Bell’s urgings, hello became the preferred telephone greeting.  (Operating manuals for the first American telephone systems in the late 1870s sometimes suggested answering the phone with hello, and sometimes suggested What is wanted?  Gee, how come that one never caught on?)

Next time you’re watching The Simpsons and you hear the cartoonishly old Mr. Burns answer the phone “Ahoy-hoy!” you’ll understand why.

Image result for Monty Burns telephone
Monty Burns: the last holdout of the "Ahoy-hoy!" salutation.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

By
Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One f...
6 comments
Read more

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

By
Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game...
1 comment
Read more

The Whoopie Cap

By
What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d ju...
Post a Comment
Read more