‘Hey, Sue.’ A Brief History of the Way We Greet One Another

The Hey Day of Informality

There are many strangers in my inbox on any given day – some welcome and some not – but I can count on at least a few who try to elbow in with the greeting, “Hey, Susan.” Or worse, Sue. After that, they go on to wonder whether I might need their services or whether I have seen an earlier email requesting a meeting. What every one of the “Hey-Susan” emails has in common is that almost none of the senders knows me. When someone writes “Hey Sue” in an email, I feel pretty confident without reading further that I can safely dispatch them to trash.

Which is not to say that I am completely unreceptive to emails from people marketing their services. That would be unforgivable hypocrisy. But I am firm in my preference for being solicited in a way that does not imply the sender already knows me when clearly, they don’t. 

There are several points to make about this. Hi is the most common written and spoken greeting in English by far, but Hey – once a regionalism largely limited to the South and to rural areas – has made major inroads among people under 45, who are several generations removed from the influence of Emily Post. For urban Baby Boomers, Hey was really a shout of warning or protest, which our mothers shut down with the canned quip, “Hey is for horses.” So, what happened to put Hey, once routinely used to wave people off, into broader national circulation as a legitimate way of waving Hello?  And why are email marketers running wild with it?

You Say Hi, and I Say Hello:  The Origins of English Greetings

Hey and Hi have long careers in the English language – first as negative interjections going back to the 12th century, and later evolving into more neutral shouts for attention. Their resemblance to exclamations in other languages might imply “natural” origins.

Over time, both Hey and Hi evolved further into greeting variants, always informal. Emily Post was sniffing at the popularity of Hi among young people in 1922, and in that same edition, advised sternly against its use as a greeting in social situations where people were first being introduced. Hey would have escaped her attention altogether, it was that uncouth. Post might have advised her readers to say, “Good Day,” a greeting that brings to mind the tip of a gentleman’s hat. It is largely gone from American English but remains standard polite usage throughout European languages today.

The word, hello, (hallo in German) comes to us by a different, rather circuitous route, having apparently evolved from “holen” – which in our Germanic “mother tongue” means to fetch.  It was presumably a shout to hunting dogs retrieving quarry. The trail gets complicated if you consider the similarity of Hello to the word Hail (as in Hail Mary or Hail, Caesar), but because hail comes from a Greek word that means to rejoice, any similarity to hello may be coincidental.  As of the 1820’s, Hello was still largely used to express surprise -- the same usage preserved today when we say “Hello?” as a kind of lilting faux-question.

Credit for the use of Hello as a standard greeting belongs to Thomas Edison, who advocated for it as standard phone etiquette over “Ahoy,” Alexander Graham Bell’s own candidate for the job. Both terms reflected the idea that a telephone “call” was a shout for attention and needed a very specific greeting to match. Because Edison was the entrepreneurial winner in most things electric, his suggested phone usage, published in early phone books as the preferred greeting, ultimately won the day too.  

But although Hello has stuck, it has always been a bit of a misfit in English -- one of those terms that escaped the telephone, but not quite. People who are being introduced to one another often drop it altogether in favor of “Nice to meet you.”  Hello fits very few situations, other than maybe an exchange of greetings between TV hosts and their guests (“Hello, Chris, good to be with you) or the synthetic, automated voice response you get when you call in a prescription at Rite Aid.  I don’t mean to beat up on Hello, but it is getting edged out of the real vernacular.

The Hi’s Have It

In fact, Hi had pretty much taken its place by the middle of the last century, but the written salutation was always “Dear so-and-so.”  Today, “dear” is reserved for formal correspondence and hand-written condolence notes. Thanks to email, Hi is true common currency in written and spoken English.

Emails may have looked like letters at first, but they quickly became an extension of talk, functioning as a replacement for conversation (in lieu of phone calls) rather than just a replacement for letters. Like Bell’s ahoy, meant to wave someone down, Hi is a bid for attention, not a show of respect. “Hi, Sue” is just-right for a medium that qualifies as neither speech nor writing.  And, of course, in a true email conversation, the salutations get dropped altogether, even if names are left in.

But once Hi established itself as an email greeting, something else was needed for in-person exchange. Hi had, essentially, been formalized a bit against its will or intention.  And when Hi became co-opted by email, a vacancy began occurring in speech. Systematic shifts are a natural phenomenon in the evolution of language.  As speech patterns move over or merge, they open up spaces that other things are bound to fill.

This easily explains why Hey has made its way into speech. Hi has moved uptown, leaving space for a more informal, downtown greeting. But why is Hey also jostling its way into email, notably in situations where you would least expect it?  Why has Hey become the preferred usage of strangers accosting you in your own inbox with something to sell? The explanation is simple. The huckster’s presumption that informality is irresistible.  

Among people who write scripts for personal marketing outreach, there has long been an unshakable view that pantomiming friendship makes it harder for targets to reject you.  It’s a gambit that plays on deeply ingrained habits. Think of the old “Hi, I’m Justin calling from the March of Dimes. How are you today?” Those were always the people I hung up on fastest because they really didn’t want to know how I was, and I certainly didn’t want to tell them. If anything, that opener invited, “too busy to talk to you!” But the same faux ethnography has persisted, unshakably, into the protocols of email spam. If you want to disarm your targets by feigning a preexisting friendship, then “Hi, Susan” is actually too formal.  Hey is the new Hi.

When Hello Is not Enough

If greetings change over time, it’s because they need to match the moment. We should expect that Hey will gain even more traction as we resume routine contact and relearn what it means to hold others in the true grasp of a greeting. Even encounters with casual acquaintances – people we used to see routinely in the check-out line or the nail salon – need to be celebrated with a fulsome, breathy, almost incredulous Heeeyyy – drawn out an extra second or two to relish the moment of fresh togetherness. Saying hello, in whatever way you say it, is not to be taken lightly. The mere act of greeting someone freely in person, once the most ordinary of behaviors, has become an uncommon pleasure. Hey may be just the right word for the job.