What a stuck up prig Henry Stanley must have been. I mean, why didn’t he simply say “hello” to Dr Livingston when he found the explorer in the depths of Africa in 1871?
Here’s why: The word had limited currency then, especially among the English upper classes. So Stanley was thrown back on the formal, “Dr Livingston, I presume”.
Now you may be wondering how hello has since become the go-to greeting for pretty much every English speaking person on the planet.
Well, imagine it’s 1878, and you’re one of the first people in the world to have a telephone (they’re not phones just yet) installed in your mansion. You’ve got a decision to make: how do you greet your callers?
Early phone manuals recommended either “what is wanted?” or the simpler “hello”. The world heaved a collective sigh of relief when “hello” quickly won out. And, one assumes, the early phone manual writers were fired and replaced by non-idiots.
Anyhow, we can thank Thomas Edison for “hello” being one of the options. It was his suggestion, apparently.
Hello is an alteration of hallo, hollo, which came from Old High German, halâ, holâ. Hello had been around in various forms in English since the 1400s as a shout to gain attention, presumably either at a distance or as a last resort at a husband glued to the sports channel. It’s also where Americans get holler, for yell.
Hello first appeared in writing in the 1830s, but really took off with the invention and subsequent spread of the telephone.
The telephone, and the greeting “hello”, were great social levellers – 19th century etiquette said you don’t speak to someone unless you’ve been introduced. Edison, who had little time for such fripperies, wasn’t having any of the longer greetings.
“Mr Edison did away with that un-American way of doing things,” according to one account. “He caught up a receiver one day and yelled into the transmitter one word – a most satisfactory, capable, soul-satisfying word – ‘Hello’. It has gone clear around the world.”
Indeed it has. But it didn’t happen instantly. Among the British upper classes, “how do you do” remained the proper greeting, at least in person, for a few more decades. The only proper response to that greeting was also “how do you do?” How they ever avoided getting caught up in an infinite loop of Monty Pythonesque “how do you do’s” is beyond me - and a little disappointing, too, I have to say.
Across the ditch, etiquette was way less formal. Hence Dorothy Parker’s famous greeting when her phone rang: “What fresh hell is this?”
Parker was a brilliant writer whose wit often overshadowed her literary skills. She’s most famous today for her one liners. When she became pregnant to a man she had no long term prospects with, she quipped, "how like me, to put all my eggs into one bastard.”
On another occasion, when a young woman invited her to enter a doorway before her with the words “age before beauty”, Parker immediately shot back “pearls before swine.”
How sad that today we live in an age where insults are so common, yet the wit with which they are delivered is so rare.
But enough reminiscing. Let me wrap this newsletter up by saying what a beautiful touch of irony it would be if the rustic American “howdy” was a contraction of the prissy English “how do you do”, but sadly there seems to be no decisive evidence for this.
I have a feeling that Dorothy Parker would have something to say about that.
I used to work with a man who would answer the phone, "Are you there?" He was no trend-follower, that one.