Hello

Pondering, as I often do, the meaning of words, this evening I got to thinking about the origins of the word "hello". Specifically I was thinking how bizarre the word "hiya" is, one which I often use. Really, it's an entirely meaningless word. So I used good old Google and found various possible explanations. One was that the word was taken partly from the French and was originally "ho la!" meaning "stop! attention! here!". Others are that it is taken from Old English "whole be thou", which doesn't make a lot of sense to me or "hail thou" which is from the bible and would seem to make most sense of all given the popularity of the bible. The telephone popularised the word and theories for this vary from the (bizarre) reckoning that you had to holler down the phone, so you would start a conversation with "holler!" which developed into hello. (I find this unlikely as well, you don't start a conversation these days with "talk!" which would be the equivalent) to the suggestion that the combination of sounds in "hello" are not harsh, tend to be hard to shout and are clear, so they worked well as a greeting. I'm quite sure you can say "hello" aggressively however, or despondently, nervously, chirpily, cheekily etc. Hmm. Say them in your head, I'm sure you'll agree. "Hi" is pretty much just a diminutive of "hello" and "hiya" is quite possibly a diminutive of "how are you?".

So there you go. I answer the phone with "hello?" followed by "hi" when I identify the caller, which was made clear to me when parodied by my sons both picking up play phones and saying "hello, hi, mmm, ok, bye". I was aware of ending virtually all calls with "ok, bye" but I didn't realise I followed the same wording every time I started a call. Better than my mother who says "hello?" in a slightly nervous tone, followed by "oooh, hellllooooo" if it's one of her cronies.

Other words that struck me from nowhere were "passport", which presumably comes from passing through ports, and seagull, which is blatantly obviously a gull that lives by the sea. These didn't cause much thought however, more of a "where does that come from... oh yeah".

CNPS - still need 19.