The Journey of ‘Hello’
Ashim Kumar Paul
Let the very
topic begin with a short of question that will lead you to seek the answer why
the topic is chosen.
What do you
say when you pick up the phone?
---Obviously,
you say ‘hello’.
What do you
say when someone introduces a friend, a relative, anybody at all?
---More
often than not, you say ‘hello’.
In fact,
it is a common scenario that a man may not know how to read a piece of article
or a novel written in sophisticated English language or may not know how to
write even in his own native language but is aware of how to utter a single
word to greet. Yes, it is the word ‘hello’ that is commonly used while one
picks up the telephone, or the cell phone, or greets people with the salutation
‘hello’. It is not surprising that a call to stop and pay attention should
become associated with the first telephones. But with all the possible ways of
saying it, why should telephones call for a different pronunciation, that of
the present-day hello? It is simply because, it is rude to shout and ‘hello’
discourages shouting. The short ‘e’ keeps the mouth more closed than ‘o’ or
‘a’, and ‘–lo’ makes a quieter ending than. ‘-loo’. Telephones badly needed
this civilizing because the first ones required people to shout and the first
telephone exchanges were manned by boys who enthusiastically shouted right
back. Nevertheless how many of us do really know the history: where did the
word come from?
The word,
‘hello’ is still considered as an acceptable form of greeting between people of
all levels and strata of society, whether it be your closest friend or the
superior of your work-place or any ordinary person, It would still be an
acceptable form of greeting either while talking face-to-face or after picking
up a phone. Once this aspect of the word “Hello” was realized, people started
to pick up on it and now it is just a custom and to a great extent an
unconscious habit. It was first used in the mid-1800s. According to the Oxford
English Dictionary, hello is an alteration of hallo, hollo, which came from Old
High German “halâ, holâ, emphatic imperative of ‘halôn’, ‘holôn’ to fetch, used
especially in hailing a ferryman.” It also connects the development of ‘hello’
to the influence of an earlier form, ‘holla’, whose origin is in the French ‘holà’
(roughly, ‘whoa there!’, from French là ‘there’). As in addition to hello,
hallo and hollo, hullo and (rarely) hillo also exist as variants or related
words, the word can be spelt using any of all five vowels. These words were
used to attract immediate attention and demand that the listener come to a
stop or cease what he or she was doing. However, ‘hallo’ was used to incite hunting dogs.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the
first published use of ‘hello’ goes back only to 1827. And it wasn't mainly a
greeting back then. People in the 1830's said ‘hello’ to attract attention (“Hello,
what do you think you're doing?”), or to express surprise (“Hello, what have we
here?”). Hello gained widespread usage through the increased use of the
telephone. The dictionary says it was Thomas Edison who put ‘hello’ into common
usage. He urged the people who used his phone to say ‘hello’ when answering.
His rival, Alexander Graham Bell, thought the better word was ‘ahoy’. Others
argued for more formal greetings like “What is wanted?” or “Are you there?”
Alexander Graham Bell, an eminent
scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator, is credited with inventing the
first practical telephone, used one piece to speak into and to listen as well. Alexander
Graham Bell originally suggested ‘ahoy’ be adopted as the standard greeting
when answering a telephone. Ahoy
is a signal word used to signal a ship or boat, stemming from the Middle
English cry, ‘Hoy!’
However, Thomas Edison did not like ‘ahoy’, he did not like Bell, what's more Bell did not like him either. Edison, as soon as he heard of the Bell invention, started working on making an improved telephone. Edison would often joke about “Bell’s apparatus”, saying to the effect that you had to go tell the person you spoke to on Bell’s phone what you had said!
Edison came up with his greeting for the phone “hell-o”. It is fun! It had its origins with Mark Twain who did use it in a printed work and it may have influenced Edison. Also it has been said that other languages may have influenced it too. Who knows? In a way, Edison was playing with Victorians who were putting skirts on piano legs and got them all to say ‘Hell....o’. To him really goes the credit for pushing the word, as he did.
However, Bell declined to utter the word ‘hello’ during his entire life and continued to use the salutation ‘ahoy ahoy’ till he died in 1922!!!
