Question

What do you say when you pick up the phone?

You say “hello”, of course.

What do you say when someone introduces a friend, a relative, anybody at all?

You say “hello”.

“Hello” has been for a long time considered to be the standard English language greeting since English people began greeting. But is that true?

It may be the most spoken word on the planet and the English word that most people learn first. The word is so familiar to us that it's surprising how new it is: “hello” has only been in use for about the last 200 years of the 1000-year history of English.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the first published use of “hello” goes back only to 1827. But it wasn't mainly a greeting back then. People in the 1830s said “hello” to attract attention (“Hello, what do you think you're doing?”), or to express surprise (“Hello, what do we have here?”).

But the true breakthrough for this now-common word was when it was used in the service of brand-new technology: the telephone. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was Thomas Edison who put “hello” into common usage. He asked the people who used his phone to say “hello” when answering—which required people to address an unseen and unknown person. It was simpler and more efficient (高效的) than some other greetings used in the early days of the telephone, such as “Do I get you?” and “Are you there?” However, the actual inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, thought that the better word was “ahoy”, which turns out to be much longer—at least 100 years longer—than “hello”. It too, was a greeting from the Dutch (荷蘭語) “hoi” meaning “hello.” For his entire life, Bell insisted on answering the phone with “Ahoy.”

“Hello” obviously caught on, and spread along with the telephone. Had it not been for Edison, our greetings might be very different today. It could be possible that we are still greeting people with “Ahoy” when picking up the phone.

1.How long has “hello” been used in the 1000-year history of the English language?

2.What was the purpose of people saying “hello” in the 1830s?

3.Who put “hello” into common usage?

4.What word did Bell prefer to use when answering the phone?

5.What is the passage mainly about?

Answer 1