"I would be careful making that kind of correlation," he explains. "Especially about the semantics of it – health versus sympathy versus whereabouts. But there is one aspect of greetings that is sensitive to the social structure of a society, which is that equals greet each other in different ways from people of different statuses. In fact, greetings can be seen to define levels of intimacy or social distance." In this sense, he adds, greetings are like magnets – confidently announcing who we are, and drawing in those we want to be associated with.
Hello in the digital age
If greetings act as social magnets, then technology has quietly altered their pull. Over the past few decades, the rise of email, texting and social media has reshaped not just how often we say "hello", but what we might replace it with – and whether we say it at all.
"If you think about WhatsApp, we're basically always in conversation – we're always online," says Christian Ilbury, senior lecturer in linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh. "When someone asks you how your day is or whether you're going to be on time for the meal, you don't always have to say 'hello' first, because it's unlikely the last message concluded with 'bye'."
Two centuries on from its print debut, the greeting is once again being stretched, clipped, replaced or ignored altogether
In a text-led, always-on world, greetings have proved especially susceptible to change and, as they are used so often, their evolution has accelerated dramatically. Ilbury has identified many non-standard and creative spellings of "hello" in his studies of digital language, from "hellooooo" and "hiiiiiii" to "heyyyyy". Yet, while tech has made it easier for us to elongate words in this way, Ilbury points out that most modern-day greetings are short, sharp and driven by brevity.