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Inventing English

Seth Lerer

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language-arts

Chapter 15

  • The student of English finds in the West a rich harvest of new words, of old words made to answer new purposes, often in the most surprising way, and of phrases full of poetical feeling, such as could only arise amid scenes of great beauty, matchless energy, and sublime danger.
  • Twain also knew that new words come into the language not just from regional travel or imaginary evocation but also from science and technology. The last half of the nineteenth century saw the American lexicon absorb new coinages from warfare, transportation, electricity, the telephone, and (by its end) the motor car.
  • Two such words in particular have come to stand as nodal points in the American idiom: words that reveal both the late nineteenth century's and our own concern with social change, technological innovation, personal relationships, and gender roles. These two words are hello and dude.
  • But the problem for the early telephone was how to address someone you could not see. Forms of address are invariably linked to social class and gender. When you meet someone, you gauge his or her social class by dress or bearing or by his or her speech to you. The conundrum for the telephone was what to say first to a speaker whose class or gender you could not know. And so a neutral word was needed. Phone greetings, culturally, are arbitrary. German bitte, Italian pronto, Spanish bueno—each culture confronts the problem differently, in these cases by adopting other words of politesse to telephonic social interaction. American English, by contrast, adopted the interjection hello—etymologically, from hallo or halloa, a term of address among sailors between ships. This maritime metaphorics inflected more directly Alexander Graham Bell's own usage, and until the end of his life (in 1922) Bell is said to have answered the phone with a loud, "Ahoy," while Edison favored "hello."
  • It was Edison who originated the salutation "HELLO!" over the telephone. This historic fact was verified by Frederick P. Fish, late President of what is now the American Telephone and Telegraph Company: 'Years ago,' said Mr. Fish, 'when the first telephones came into use, people were accustomed to ring a bell on the box and then say, ponderously: "Are you there?" "Are you ready to talk?" Mr. Edison did away with that awkward, un-American way of doing things. He caught up the receiver one day and yelled into the transmitter one word—a most satisfactory, capable, soul-satisfying word—"HELLO!" It has gone around the world.'
  • This anecdote encapsulates an ideal of American directness and invention that had been embraced for half a century. It signals a kind of linguistic manifest destiny, a hello gone round the world.