Hello again, one last time

A survey… has found that telephone manners are dying as a third of 18-24-year-olds no longer answer calls with “hello”. To the Mail this is a terrible sad state of affairs.

But it’s not as if the yoof are instead saying, “Whaddyawant?” or “I hope you and those you love die soon” … they’re saying “Hi” or “Yo”. Hardly a devastating loss of manners. We should be glad that the texting generation answer the phone at all, and use vowels when they do.

And there was a time when “Hello” would have been a new and shocking piece of slang. It’s little more than a century and a half old — coined by Thomas Edison or Mark Twain or Lionel Richie, probably. Mail readers of the time must have been apoplectic. The first telephone was answered with “Ahoy hoy”, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t go back to that… My dad still answers the phone with its number, though that takes longer now: when he first picked up a receiver, I believe he said: “Six”. My mother answers with her name. I use “hello”, but will readily change in order to keep up with the times…

Will “Hello” soon join other 20th century anachronisms like the quiff, communism and fruit juice as a starter? Kingsville, Texas, has already rejected “Hello” as its official greeting, on the grounds that it starts with “Hell”, turning instead to “Heaven-o”. Absolutely true. I read it on Wikipedia. So, possibly not true. But I do like the idea of reintroducing a religious basis to our greetings, while keeping the jolly “o” ending. “Valhalla-o” for your remaining Vikings; Buddhists can have “Coming back as a cockroach or an eagle depending on how you did-o”; “oblivion-o” sounds cheery for atheists; I and my fellow agnostics might go with “dunno-o”.Cheerie-bye and farewell for now.

Excerpted from a comment by Carrie Quinlan in ‘The Guardian’