23: Hello (Around the English Language in 80 Words)

Hello everyone! An ordinary greeting, you might think, but that sentence, 150 years ago, would have made absolutely no sense.

Salutations come at the beginning or end of an encounter, and the first thing you need to know about a particular salutation is whether it is used for ‘coming’ or ‘going’, or both. A hundred and fifty years ago, our standard greetings – Good day, Good morning, Good afternoon, Good evening, even Good night – were nicely flexible: they were as valid when you turned to leave as when you arrived. The idea of using the same salutation on arrival and departure has now pretty much disappeared from most varieties of English: even when you’re being politely formal (to a customer, for example), you may initially still shake hands with “Good morning/afternoon/evening” on your lips, but the last word between you will be “Goodbye”. Even in Australian English, where “G’day” is still a standard informal greeting, it’s strictly a starter, not a finisher. “Good night”, meanwhile, is always final, never introductory. Maybe it is for this reason that some English-speakers like to adopt the Italian “Ciao” – it’s not for everyone, but it’s arguably the only reasonably acceptable two-way option in twenty-first century English.

From the late-16th century the parting benediction “God be with you!” started to collapse through “God bwi’t’ye” and other contractions into the salutation “Goodbye!”, to eventually replace the older “Farewell!” as our standard way of marking the end of an encounter. “Goodbye” is now universal, both formal and informal, familiar and polite, although “Bye” and the slightly more childish “Bye-bye” are as common in informal English.

Hello, in its current form and meaning, is a much more recent addition to the English language. Until the late 19th century, Hello! or, more often, Hallo! or Hullo! (deriving from Holla!) was an exclamation used to attract attention or express surprise. You might greet a long-lost cousin in the street with Hallo!, but it wouldn’t be appropriate when your boss introduced you to his wife.

(In this situation, by the way, the expression used would have been the ever-confusing “How do you do?” which does not mean either “How are you?” or “Ciao”, but “[I’m] Pleased to meet you”; when it still exists today, which it hardly does, it is only for use (1) in extremely formal situations and (2) at a first meeting; and the only possible response to “How do you do?” is an echoed “How do you do?” The American English adaptation, “howdy”, which you will mostly hear in cowboy films, was a more conventional, and much more informal greeting).

Last week I talked about how much of our modern vocabulary has become re-shaped by late 20th/ early 21st century technology. But the same thing happened back in the time of Thomas Edison. The story of how “Hello”, originally the preferred American English variant of the above exclamation, became the most common greeting in the English language, is the story of the invention of the telephone. A new way of talking to people – people who you couldn’t see, and who might not even share your morning, afternoon or evening if they weren’t in the same part of the world, seemed to require a new set of rules. The normal greetings felt wrong, or strange. Alexander Graham Bell, the man who took credit for the invention of the telephone, imagined that people would greet each other with the sailor’s call “Ahoy!” But that great shaper of the modern world, Thomas Edison, had a catchier idea: Hello! In fact, I have heard it said that, given that most of Edison’s innovations were actually adaptations of other inventors’ ideas, his only truly original invention was the word Hello! as a greeting.

By 1889, the female switchboard operators who mediated all telephone conversations were known as “hello-girls”, after their novel form of salutation. Hello was now confirmed as a greeting, although the English took a while to be convinced by that “e”. Less than forty years later, though, even that resistance had weakened: according to the great language commentator H.W. Fowler, in his “Dictionary of Modern English Usage” of 1926, “Hello, formerly an Americanism, is now almost as common as Hullo in Britain…and the Englishman cannot be expected to give up his right to say hello if he likes it better than his native hullo.”

Now that we British have also adopted “hi” (which actually first appeared in American English a little before the time of the “hello-girls”) as our most determinedly informal salutation (along with its variant “hiya”, horribly modern to conservative ears, although its use actually dates back to 1940), hello stands as the perfect neutral, middle-of-the-road greeting, never too formal and never too informal, to complement goodbye. “Howdy” might tell our listener that we’re from the Southern States of America, “G’day” that we’re Australian, and “How do you do?” that we like to imagine we live in an age before The Beatles were invented; the only information that Hello or Goodbye give away is whether we’re coming or going.