Goodby “Hello”— We’ll Miss You
It’s Andy here today. Ann is over in OurLittleCorner cruising a popular grocer’s prepared food aisles.
Ann and I have decided to part ways with our landline phone. According to Numberbarn.com, that puts us among the 40.9 million folks who in the last five years have made the plunge to rely exclusively on cell phones.
Even though we had been gradually weaning ourselves from our increasingly dormant landline, dropping the service wasn’t an easy decision. After all, we’d spent nearly eight decades using “real” phones that carry our voices over copper wires. For some reason the thought of chatting with someone through thin air seemed less “personal” (for want of a better term). But technology marches on (as does the increasing number of spam calls), so we reluctantly retired our faithful landline phone.
The massive and dramatic changes in phone technology have been accompanied by more subtle changes in how we conduct ourselves on the phone. One of those subtle changes is the topic of a recent NY Times piece by Alisha Haridasani Gupta entitled The Generation That’s Never Had to Say ‘Hello?’ . She suggests that for younger generations, answering a phone with a hello is becoming as obsolete as is the landline . This is rather disturbing considering that I grew up assuming that uttering hello when answering the phone not only was polite, it was imperative.
I had never really given much thought to why hello rather than some other greeting became the norm; it was just what everyone said. But of course the hello greeting had to come from somewhere. Evidently it didn’t come from Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the phone in 1876; according to Wikipedia he answered his new-fangled invention with a nautical “ahoy ahoy.” Rather, the now taken-for-granted hello came about due to the urging of Thomas Edison who in 1877 recommended to industry leaders that the standard phone greeting protocol should be”hullo” (which later morphed to “hello”).
[Editor’s Note: It’s interesting to contemplate what it would have been like if Edison not stepped in and Bell’s greeting had caught on. I can’t imagine hearing (or saying) “ahoy ahoy” with every phone call — although I can imagine it being grist for a Monty Python skit.}
The greeting “Hello” (not “Ahoy ahoy”) became associated with telephones in the late 19th century. (source: wikipedia)
So, if hello is waning, what’s taking its place? Gupta, who is writing mainly about the phone greetings of the Gen Zers who grew up with caller ID, provides examples along the lines of “Hi,” “Yo,” “What’s up?” “Where are you?” or even “Yeah?” And at the extreme, some say nothing and wait for the caller to speak first (which seems kind of creepy to me).
However, based on my own experience I would say that Gen Zers aren’t the only ones abandoning hello. Even those of us who cut our teeth on rotary phones are finding ourselves using the greeting less and less. We may not be as technologically savvy as Gen Zers, but most of us have retained enough grey matter to understand caller id. When we receive calls from folks we know, we know that they know that we know who’s calling, in which case a “Hi Sally” or “What’s up Charlie” may be more appropriate than an impersonal hello.
Furthermore, we elders are able to grasp the fact that calls from unknown numbers are more than likely to be spam and should either be cancelled or left to go to voice mail, thus relieving us of the obligation of uttering any personal greetings at all. Given the volume of potential spam calls I receive, the number of lost opportunities for a hello is not trivial.
At the end of the day I have to agree that, as with landline phones, there are valid and practical reasons hello is on the endangered species list . But that doesn’t stop me from fondly recalling those days when phones had wires going to the wall and it was of little concern that we didn’t know who was calling until after we offered the hello greeting.
So it’s time to say , “Goodby hello, it was a nice ride while it lasted — we’ll miss you.”
