You Had Me At Ahoy

If you think slang terms developed for email, texting, and instant messaging—LOL, BRB, NSFW, etc.—are a passing fad, I have one word for you: Hello!

As Nate Barksdale explains , the word Emily Post tried to ban got a boost from an earlier technological innovation—the telephone:

Initiating a conversation on the telephone involved two difficulties: first, the person might or might not even be there; and second, the caller had no way of knowing who they were talking to, and thus how they should be appropriately addressed.

For the technical problem, there were several early contenders. The British favoured “Are you there?” as a proper way of answering the phone, and in the days of newfangled and spotty phone technology, it was probably a useful one, saving the user the embarrassment of accidentally offering a personal greeting to the void. Once connection became commonplace, one assumes “Are you there?” must have lost its edge as the implications of its question drifted from the technical to the existential.

Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone’s inventor, unsuccessfully promoted an alternative that outdid even hello for nautical implications, answering his phone calls with a hearty AHOY! (This tidbit opens up in me a great deep pool of longing for a pop-cultural world that might have been: Ahoy Kitty pencil cases, Jim Morrison crooning “Ahoy, I love you, won’t you tell me your name,” Renée Zellweger shutting up Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire with a tearful “You had me at ahoy!”) But it was Thomas Edison who won the day (or at least claimed the day in hindsight), suggesting the old ferry-hail-whoa-there as being most suitable, writing to a business partner, “I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away.”

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