Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Word "Hello"

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why the word "hello" is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

The word hello, known for being a greeting, famous for being a pretty common greeting, nobody thinks much about it. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why the word hello is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie!

Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of the word hello? Yes, hi Alex. Hello. Hi. Yeah, hi. Hello. I should have said hello folks at the beginning. That's an obvious miss by me. Yeah. Yeah, you kind of, like I was trying to do the whole like, oh, I don't know that this is the topic.

I'm just responding to hello, but you're actually very specific and clear in your language. So that Alex that really take that evidence. Cassell. Oh, golden. Take that really teed me up well for a joke. Yeah, I like halos. Yeah, I'm a big fan of hello. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, it's got hell in it, which a joke. Yeah, I like hellos. Yeah, I'm a big fan of hello. Yeah, it's cool.

It's got hell in it, which is rad. Yes. It's got O in it, which is neat. I like the various takes on hello. I like to spice it up a little bit with a hi or a heya. Or even if I'm feeling nasty, sometimes I say howdy. Amazing. We'll have a takeaway later about the word hell being contained in this word.

It has mattered at one point. Ah, really? Okay. And I agree with everything else too, yeah. It's fun. And it's like so common and broadly positive that it's just a pleasant part of my life, the word hello. Hello, great.

What's your favorite sort of hello, like take on hello? Is it hey, is it aloha, ahoy hoy? We'll also talk about Mr. Verne's in one joke on the Simpsons saying ahoy hoy, because folks may know that speaks to the history of answering the phone. But this is amazing. And yeah, I think I say hi a lot. I think

I say hey a lot. There's a somewhat Midwestern thing of saying you guys to meet any group of people, regardless of gender. I think I say hey you guys a lot or like, hey guys, you know? And then hey folks. But like probably highs and highs more often than hello if I like recorded myself and did the stats. I say howdy a surprising amount of times despite not growing up in the south or in Texas or the Midwest. It's a good word and I like it and I feel like it's not fair if I don't get to use it. I'm from Southern California. You guys all get to use the word dude. I get to say howdy. Nice. Yeah, there's some kind of Western element, right? You know? Yeah, exactly.

California had a country music scene in Bakersfield specifically and like, you know, it's all right. Yeah, my mom's from Bakersfield, so there we go. Your mom is essentially Merle Haggard in a good way. I got country roots. Yeah. And I love this topic suggestion. It's from the Empire Strikes First on the Discord

with support from Elizabeth and lots of other people in the polls. And one reason I love it is that we have an entire episode in just the word hello. Yes. This is not a broad episode about greetings. This is about the specific English language word hello. It's great. Yes. I'm excited. I'm excited to get acquainted with hello. I'm going, I want

to say hello to hello. Yeah, maybe we'll say hello so much it starts to lose meaning, you know? It just becomes a word vibe. I love that. There's a word, there's a word for that. What is it? Yeah, we looked it up the other day. Semantic satiation. There we go. Semantic satiation. Yeah. We might get there with hello. We'll see.

Giraffe, giraffe, giraffe, giraffe, giraffe, giraffe, giraffe. I just forget giraffes exist. If only an animal was tall. This is my contention. If we weren't so used to the shape of a giraffe every time we would see one we would scream I Do agree I've also feel like parrots are an animal from fantasy realms and just we're used to them like a talking Yeah, we're just get out of here. She's a bird that can freakin talk and we're just like, yeah, you know, whatever

It's this like really kind colorful bird that sits on your shoulder and says, oh yeah, that should exclusively be in like It's this like colorful bird that sits on your shoulder and says, hello. Yeah, that should exclusively be in like the Wheel of Time or something. You know, that's wild. We're just a quick, very thankful detour. This happens to be the 250th episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. I felt like this topic that you folks chose chose I wanted to use any topic you folks choose because that's one of the best parts of the show and also I feel like Hello has such a warmth to it

And also welcoming like you can listen to any episode at any time You don't need the background of other episodes. So 250 can be your starting point. It works. Great. Hello. There you go. Hello Welcome. We're halfway to 500 Hello. There you go. Hello. Welcome. We're halfway to 500 We are and it's a miracle that folks who support the show have made it happen and we're both so thankful to you So, thank you. Yes. Well speak for yourself Alex I'm extremely famously ungrateful, but I'm actually very grateful Alex just says he's grateful. I am very grateful. Oh no, my facade. Oh no. Yeah, as you can hear we love doing this, so thank you. We do, we do. Thank you. Thank you guys.

And on to 251 and 500. In the meantime, hello. Hello. On most episodes we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. We will strangely break format on episode 250 to lead with one takeaway before the stats and numbers. Spicy. Because takeaway number one, hello is an old word for shouting for attention that became

a greeting for telephones. Whoa. that became a greeting for telephones. Whoa! I just assumed prehistoric man went up to, like, Og went up to Grog, and it was like, hello, and then smacked Grog with a stick, the hello stick. Yeah, and folks might know elements of this takeaway through pop culture, either one specific Simpsons joke where Mr. Burns answers the phone with ahoy hoy. Also, if people know the lore behind Michigan J. Frog, the Looney Tunes character, a singing frog. Hello, my baby. Hello, my honey. Hello, my springtime gal. Exactly. So those touchstones have taught people parts of this, but there's a lot here, especially with linguistics and history. It turns out the word hello has only been an ordinary greeting in the English language

for about 150 years. It's pretty new. Wow. So it was brought into being by telephones. Before then, what would we say? Would we say, Prizzy, I greet thine self with my word mouth. It's an excellent question. Yeah, we need to greet each other.

The key sources for this takeaway are a wonderful book called Because Internet, Understanding the New Rules of Language, which is by linguist, science communicator, and more Gretchen McCulloch. And we're also leaning on a piece for the Saturday Evening Post written by Andy Hollant back. It turns out the Saturday Evening Post is still a publication. That's a new piece from 2017. I think they're just online. I see. But do they only post it on Saturday evening? Most websites don't post Saturday night, you know, so they can take over. So yeah, before we used Hello as an ordinary interpersonal greeting, Gretchen McCulloch says the most common greetings were stuff like, good morning, sir.

There's all sorts of things, but we would often mention the time of date and something about the person. Right. Yeah, I mean, in Italian, a common greeting is buon giorno, which means good day, which you ironically only say for part of the day. After a certain point, you got to say buonasera, which means good evening. Yeah. Yeah.

I have noticed that with European languages. There's a lot of time of date greetings that we're taught, maybe partly because the language classes are relatively formal. I mean, we also have ciao, which I've gotten in such you like I'm so used to saying chow now instead of saying hello. Sometimes I slip up and I say it in the U.S. and I sound like such an a-hole, just a pretentious a-hole. And I really don't mean to. Oh, yeah. It's just an accident.

I don't I don't have a Mercedes, I promise. Right, right. And it's too bad because everyone understands what it means. So they just get mad at you. They're not like, what does that mean? Or curious or anything. They're just mad. It's a great greeting.

It's been taken over by people with Mercedes, which I resent, because I don't even have a car. That's true actually, yeah, yeah. Katie of the people walking among them. That's exactly, I mean, I do, because I don't have a car. Yeah, like there's no one dominant greeting pre-hello, but Gretchen McCulloch says that basically people would be face-to-face in basically all greeting situations with the

specific exception of written communication. So you would usually kind of acknowledge what time of day it is and something about the person. Like, good morning, sir, is not overly fancy, not overly warm, pretty efficient. Another example is good morning, doctor. There's probably context clues or personal knowledge where you know they're a doctor. It's the morning. You can say that stuff.

We've had the word hello or little spelling variations, slight variations on how we say it for a lot of centuries, but apparently before the 1800s, it was primarily a word to like shout for attention. I see. And this oddly came up a little bit on the recent CIF episode about emergency phone numbers. We talked about people hallowing fire in colonial, the US. Which is wild because there's the word hallowing,

which means calling attention to a fire, but then you don't say, halloo. Yeah, like you could say, hello, hello, like as a way of- But then why not call it, hallowing? Why do we have to say, hallooing? The issue seems to be the long running thing in printed communication and written communication of just spelling stuff funny. Just spellings were loose until pretty recently.

And so when people look for a first written example of hello, they think it's from the 1820s, but then there's a bunch of earlier variations on the spelling too. So it's hard to pin down when we first wrote this word. Because hello was also not that common outside of shouting for attention situations, and people kind of make wild noises shouting for attention. Hello! Yeah, exactly.

That's about as good as hello. And yeah, and there's an odd cultural thing and medium of communication thing where the telephone was pretty much our second time in human history where you greet someone you're not looking at. All the writing happens and then people just tend to be relatively formal with greetings or they skip a greeting. And then with telephones, you don't see the person on the other end so you can't describe them. That's why you always ask what are you wearing when you first pick up the phone? A very polite age sex location is always good.

Yeah. Yes, you can't describe them. And also as telephones improved, you might be a distance apart or even time zones apart. So you don't necessarily know if it's the morning or the evening there, like it is where you are. And so people said, for etiquette, let's find a new greeting and like a standard short telephone greeting. Okay, yeah.

That makes sense. It does. It adds up. Yeah. And then as they looked for this, there was just sort of a specific situation where Americans were driving a lot of the setup of telephone infrastructure Especially because of two people Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison Bell patents his telephone in 1876 Edison develops improved ways to transmit the sound of a phone call in 1877 one year later.

And so the two of them are kind of the leading people of all this and they each have different pitches for the telephone words and also enough influence to kind of drive this debate. Right, right. Okay, so we've got some candidates maybe for phone greetings. Yeah, and the two candidates, they both come from words that already existed in English for loud signaling. One of them is hello, suggested by Thomas Edison, and the other is ahoy, suggested by Alexander Graham Bell. Man, I wish we'd gone with ahoy. Mr. Burns in the joke kind of adds an extra ahoy on the end of ahoy.

So it's extra old timey. Yeah. Ahoy was slightly more maritime, but you would use hello the same way to shout to another boat. Yeah. But it was not normal to then do that in face-to-face conversation. It's like why we don't shout ahoy to start a conversation.

Why you don't shout ahoy to start a conversation. Why you don't shout ahoy to start a conversation. I guess it is a little SpongeBob coded in a good way. Ahoy hoy. Yeah. So both of them just had different opinions on it. Basically they didn't have like a fight. The next step, slightly murky, in some way the public simply preferred hello over ahoy. People just went that way.

Yeah, I mean, it rolls off the tongue pretty well, but so does ahoy. They're both equally good ideas, really. Yeah. And there's also one influence on all this, which is early printed directories of phone numbers and phone information. Because you could always call the operator, but also people gradually started dialing their own numbers. And the directories usually included instructional pages on phone etiquette because this was new. Right.

It's like, do not breathe heavily into the phone for five minutes. You should start speaking about as soon as the other person picks up. That's a good tip. As one directory said, callers should answer their phone with quote, a firm and cheery, helloa. That's H- Helloa? This is a dark horse.

Where does helloa come from? That's H-U-L-L-O-A. Helloa. So it's like a weird-L-L-O-A. Helloa. So it's like a weird spelling of hello or a slightly different word. There was also a lot of like just forming a monoculture of what the word hello should sound like and be spelled like, which is weird to think about. Yeah. But at the same time, those directories didn't like dominate culture because that same example of a directory also told people you could answer with the phrase, what is wanted?

That's what I'm going to do. You know what you say when you answer the phone in Italy? No, what? ready. It's a holdover from when there was operators and switchboards where you'd answer the phone basically telling the operator, you know, pronto, ready, ready to receive. You don't say chow usually unless it's like, unless you know who's calling you and it's like a buddy or a relative, then you, yeah, you might say chow or buongiorno or whatever. But if it's a, if you don't know who it is, it's normal to say pronto. That's a fantastic example of another thing here, which is that hello specifically changed

this way in the English language. And many other languages didn't do this progression. Yeah, because you don't say pronto to greet someone in real life in Italian. It's really just for the phone. Yeah, and Gretchen McCulloch points out that German did their own version where they've started to say hallo recently on phones because of US and British globalization.

And because also the word hallo spelled H-A-L-L-O has been in the German language for a long time. But the German language speakers just developed a different custom when phones rolled out, where they say their own last name when they answer. Huh, interesting. Almost like a detective in a US TV show to me. Yeah, golden hair and I got a dame with legs that go nowhere. Crying to me about some kind of murder.

And another example is the French language. They for a long time have had the word alo, which is a-l-l and then an o with a circumflex over it. And they adopted alo for use on the phone sort of like English speakers adopted hello for use on the phone. But then French speakers have not really proceeded to use alo in the rest of situations and English speakers have. Right. Yeah. So like each language does all this different because nobody like agreed on it or anything.

It just developed locally with each group. If we could just kind of figure out some normalization for emoji use among the nations, that would be really helpful. Because I stopped using emojis in the US because it was like, ah, it's a lame thing. Only old people do now. And now I'm in Italy and everyone's using emojis. And I just don't know whether or not

I'm supposed to use emojis. So, you know, this is- Just post a lot of Bison emojis. They'll love it. They'll figure it out. Yeah. That's the answer. Listen, I get a nickel every time someone he's got. He's got emoji money, people. But yeah, yeah, like it's so local and so specific to languages or countries or cultures, and it could have just gone a lot of ways. The other odd thing is that these phone directories in English language places also promoted a

lot of ways to end a call. Like one said you should end with the phrase, that is all. But this really, other than the word hello beating ahoy, nobody could really dictate much of this from the top down. That is all quick. Yeah, like it's... It's wild though, because like in movies, you will not be able to not notice this now that I say it, but in movies, people don't say bye over the phone.

They just hang up on each other. They just move on. It's a thing. It's a documented thing like in movies. Like they don't usually bother in the dialogue to have people say, all right, goodbye, talk to you soon or talk to you later. They just hang up. They're like, all right. And then like, hang up the phone. It's like, who does that? Yeah, I've also heard from people in other countries that pop culture has led them to think that is how Americans end phone calls. Like we're super rude. Yeah. Because they just see it in every movie

and show. So that makes sense that they would think that. I had a European ask me why Americans either don't take water with their pills or swallow pills with alcohol. Like they don't. They don't. They're like, well then why in movies is that always the thing? It's like, cause like in movies they're trying to show how tough someone is. So it's like, he's taking aspirin with some, with some rum or he's taking aspirin, just, you know, dry swallowing it to show how tough he is. And they're like, well, that's stupid. I'm like, yeah, USA, USA. Oh, that's such a great one.

Yeah. We're nerds and geeks like the rest of you with pills. Like you get your little thing out and a little glass of water. Yeah. It's like the rest of the world. And yeah. And then hello, very slowly expanded beyond the telephone and I mentioned Michigan Jay Frog. Folks also might know that frog as like a mascot of the WB or something.

But yeah, it's a... Hello Marock, I'm Gal. There was a Looney Tunes short in 1955 called One Froggy Evening where a human finds this frog that does an amazing performance of that song but only only when no one's looking. And that's the bit. A human from the future. No, no, you're right. It's a human who's doing a construction thing. Yeah, construction. Takes a brick out of a building. There's like a weird little box inside and this frog with a top hat and cane pops out. And normally it just sits there making frog noises. But when it's just him,

he does the, hello, my baby. Hello, my darling. Hello, my ragtime gal and dances around. That's great. And the guy goes insane. It's fantastic. Yeah. And we'll make a few things about it, including our buddy, Jason Pargin made a video about this. It turns out that that song is from more than 50 years earlier. It was written in 1899 by two songwriters on Tin Pan Alley in New York, who were writing about new technology and social trends

and the word hello being a telephone word. It was like, can you believe you can call me on the telephone or something? Yeah. So it's a reference to a technological era that changed the word hello. Because in the full song, doesn't it reference a telephone call? Send me a kiss by wire. Like, there's specific references to technology, but none of us think about it in 1955 or later.

We're like, yeah, sure. And so this has been a really gradual process and recent process of hello not being almost like an emoji or another super specific piece of how we communicate through just one medium. TTYL. Talk to you later. Truly. It's like if TTYL became the main way we talk to each other out loud, yeah. I mean, I do, the one of those sort of early AIM chat became shorthand for things like LOL. I do hear people say LOL in real life, LOL or LOL.

Like that one seems to have, I mean, I feel like we could do a whole episode on that. So I won't get into it too much, but it's just, it's a really interesting shorthand because it serves a function that we don't necessarily have in the language, which is indicating a mild amusement where you're not actually laughing. Because when you say LOL, you're not actually laughing. Like, because when you say LOL, you're not actually laughing out loud. That's what it originally indicated, right? You're saying LOL, but you're not. You're staring slack-jawed at your computer.

And now it's like you're using LOL when you're texting. You're not laughing, you're slack-jawed at your phone. And so people using it in real life, it's really interesting in real life because when you say LOL or LOL, it's something where you're indicating, I find this amusing. It didn't make me laugh, but it's sort of a wry amusement.

So I'm not laughing, but I am really amused right now. And I find that really interesting. It's just so cool when language creeps up on us like that. And you're right, like, LOL said out loud does have a specific valence and vibe and maybe sarcasm. And then part of the spread of hello really fast, really quickly is that it can be very generic in kind of an opposite way.

It's just like, if someone says hello and doesn't put stank on it or something, I just figure it's hello. I don't read more into it. It put some stank on hello. Hello. Yeah. Or romance. If you just say hello, there's nothing else there and that's useful. You just want a neutral greeting.

You're not going, hello, which means something different from just saying hello. It serves a really useful function. Yeah. And Gretchen McCulloch, she's a linguist. She says one technical name for that is phatic expression. P-H-A-T-I-C, phatic expression. Well, excuse you, Gretchen, Jesus. And that means an expression that the meaning mostly comes from its context and vibe.

The actual words aren't what's meant. And so one thing that can happen with those is like someone will reply with the phatic expression from a different phatic expression if that makes sense? Nope. Explain it to me. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. Her example is if you say, what's up?

And the other person replies, good, how are you? Right. The meaning is still kind of there. You're both greeting each other and receiving the greeting, but the literal words of, what's up? Good, how are you? Is not quite aligned if you think about it. Because you are supposed to say, not much, how are you? How about you?

Yeah. In fact, you're supposed to, in fact, now you're supposed to say, NM, HBU. So, but yeah, I mean. Yeah, because if someone says hello and I reply, I mean. Yeah, because if someone says hello and I reply, I'm great, thanks. It can be okay, we can just keep going. Right. The last thing with Hello's spread is that it's no longer our latest new simple greeting.

It's paved the way for hi and also for hey. So are those are newer than hello? It's a thing where they've all been in the language apparently for a few centuries at least. But as recently as the 1960s researchers for the dictionary of American English surveyed Americans about how they greet each other and apparently a hello had broken through by this point. Like as as the 1940s, there were etiquette books that said, hello should not be an ordinary conversation. But by around the 60s, that debate was kind of over. And when they did this 1960 survey,

hello was the dominant answer for how you greet people. And a lot of people used hi, but almost nobody used hey. Hey was still breaking in in that meeting. But hi and hey, they're not necessarily just variants of hello because you were saying that they came before or they've been in the language for a long time. So it's not like hello getting shortened to hi or hey somehow. That's right, yeah, it turns out they've all been around

and it just becomes more or less common for people to use them. Because also that 1960s survey found that howdy was much more popular than hay. Just because there's no real reason. I mean, as it should be. Howdy is such a good word. I love howdy. It's so fun. It's got the right flavor for me. That's why I use it. It's so fun. It's got the right flavor for me. That's why I use it. That's really good. How do you do? How do you do? How do you howdy? Subantixatiation, best this week.

But yeah, so hello is so ordinary. It is truly, truly sif, but it's a word we borrowed from shouting about fires or boats and incorporated into the telephone etiquette. And then it just got popular across the rest of English language speaking. Yeah. It's so weird. With this words origin established,

we can get into numbers and statistics about it. All right, I'm excited. This week, that stats and numbers segment is in a segment called... Hello, is it stats you're looking for? There are graphs for your eyes, there are numbers to make you smile. It's all the facts you wanted. The data cannot hide. Cause we know which stats to say and also which numbers to. And we want to tell you so much about stats.

That was beautiful, Alex. Way less uncomfortable than the music video that I've seen about it, where it's a guy who falls in love with this blind girl and then he sculpts her head and then like, it doesn't seem that they're dating yet. And he's like, here's the bust of you I sculpted. And she's into it, which is nice. but I feel like if a guy kind of before we started dating hit me with a bust of my head he did, I'd be a little concerned. I would not say ahoy, ahoy to that, tell you what. And this name was submitted by Serial Fron on the Discord.

They also saw that the topic was suggested and geared it toward it. So thank you. And we have a new name for this every week. Please make a Missillian Wacky Mbe as possible. Submit through Discord or to civpod at gmail.com. And the first number this week is going to go with an audio clip because the number is 2018. And 2018 is the year when scientists recorded and published audio of orcas saying the word hello.

This is going to be a person kind of cueing the orcas. You'll hear a human voice and then replying orca voice. And here we go. Hello. Hello. Hello. So there you have it. I listened to the full clip and it's not, the orcas are imitating, like seem to be imitating

a lot of other things and it's really, really amazing and cool from a linguistic and evolutionary biology perspective, what is very funny about the clip is that some of them do kind of sound like the orcas going like, ah, and that's very spooky and very cool. But then in other parts of the clip, they're like saying one, two, and then the orca just going, pfft.

And I just don't really buy it that the orca is counting. I'm sorry, guys. By the way, if folks have not heard the Creature Feature podcast, the Look Who's Squawking segment is the greatest animal, noisiest thing in the world. Check it out. Yeah, it's an example of orcas being prompted to imitate a lot of human sounds, like Katie said. And one of the first sounds they reach for is the word hello,

because especially in the internet globalized era, it's spread worldwide, the word hello. So we wanted to see if orcas could do it. It's also a good word for an animal to imitate when it has any kind of range of vocal highs and lows, but without being able to do the consonants in human language, right? Birds are specifically good at imitating us because they have a syrinx, which allows the production of a lot of complex sounds. Orcas and dolphins and other really intelligent cetaceans are really, really interesting because they have great capacity for complex noises because of using it for both short distances, short communication, and longer

echolocation. And so they can make these like little weird noises, but they're also really sophisticated in terms of their linguistic abilities. And so it's not so surprising to me that they are able to kind of mimic at least the cadence of human speech. They're not going to be speaking in full sentences and putting on a top hat and dancing around, unfortunately, but it is really interesting. Hello, my whaley. Hello, my orca. Hello, my cetacean gal. And exactly like you said, they are amazing at sharing sounds. This 2018 study, it was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It was university

researchers in Chile and in Spain. And they used an orca born in captivity. Her name is Wiki. She lives at Marine Land Aquarium, which is in France. Researchers knew she could follow a gesture command where the gesture told her to repeat the action of another orca. They had the trainer use the gesture command for repeating stuff after the trainer made noises.

Wiki learned she got a treat if she imitated the trainer's noise. So the orcas are amazing at sharing noises with each other and imitating noises, and they may do that socially. The study indicates that also if an orca is saying a word like hello, it's probably just parroting it. It doesn't know English. There was also like a beluga whale that would mimic human words. Because it was, and it was also in captivity.

It seems like captivity is the really important thing. It has to sort of, when it's young, it has to form this connection with people where it sees the people as part of its pod or family unit. And then it would want to mimic the sounds that we're making. Right. Because they would in the wild probably dynamically learn how to make sounds from their cohorts. But the beluga's name I think was Knock and yeah it's kind of it's like very spooky. I don't know if I don't know that he would say hello. Let me see.

So kind of there's a little bit of that almost hello in there maybe. I think if he can't say enough syllables. Yeah, sure. That was incredible. T-I-L, belugas are a lot more fun to talk to than orcas because that was amazing. Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. Yo, yo, yo, yo. And the orcas are like, hello, hello. Like a Squidward vibe, yeah. Hello. And then the other numbers this week, it's kind of a quick number section. The numbers are seven because I'm linking a feature from The Guardian by music writer

Michael Han. He indexed seven very famous songs that are simply titled Hello. And they're all from the past few decades. It's recent pop music. Whoa, okay. I mean, let me see if I can think of ones. Is there a Beatles song? I know there's a Beatles song where they say hello a lot,

but I don't know if that's the title of it. That'll be our next takeaway. It's called Hello Goodbye. We'll get into it. Okay, okay, okay. But this is specifically seven songs where the entire title is the word hello, that's it. Okay. Okay. Okay. But this is this is specifically seven songs where the entire title is the word Hello, that's it. Huh. Okay, and the artists are Lionel Richie

That was the stats song his song. Hello and then we built the bust of the woman he's wooing Yeah, and the other artists are Adele Oasis. Oh, yeah, and then a band from the 90s in the UK called The Beloved, and then Evanescence, Ice Cube, and Beyoncé. Oh my gosh. It's bands and singers. It's for real. Yeah.

All these songs are flooding my head right now. A lot of them were huge hits. The Lionel Richie song hit number one on three different music charts, pop, R&B, and adult contemporary. The song Hello was the first track on Oasis' album What's the Story, Morning Glory, one of the biggest albums of that whole decade. And Adele's Hello topped the pop charts for 10 consecutive weeks in 2015 and 2016. And it was on her album titled 25 that sold the

second most copies of any album of the entire 2010s. The only bigger seller was another Adele album called 21. So you can make huge music just titling it Hello in a kind of interesting way. And then the other musical number here is 1967 because that's the year when the Beatles topped the UK Christmas single charts with the song Hello Goodbye. Yeah, that's the one that I know because I'm cool. Kind of me too, Eds. It does get its own. Takeaway number two. The Beatles song Hello Goodbye came out of a songwriting demo during a grieving process.

Oh, wow. Really? This was Paul McCartney and their friend Alastair Taylor were both grieving the death of Beatles manager Brian Epstein. And in a hangout, they kind of accidentally wrote the song, Hello Goodbye. Like they were sort of talking about their friend and then saying a lot of hellos and goodbyes or what was the accidental nature of it? So August 1967, Brian Epstein unexpectedly dies. He had managed the Beatles business and public image and everything for a long time and a key time. And so Paul McCartney, he's hanging out with Epstein's former personal assistant Alistair Taylor. Taylor will go on to run some of their business in Epstein

stead. And you know, grief is weird. There can be a lot of just sitting around. Yeah. And as they hang out, then Taylor says, Hey, Paul McCartney, how do you write songs? Like, while I have you, show me how you, an amazing songwriter, write songs. That'd be fun, right? That's a thing we can do while we're sad. That is a really good observation about grief because like one of the main things is what do you do with your time? Because you can't focus really on anything and you're just sort of trying to focus on keeping on,

eating food when you can, going about your, it's just like you can't, your normal stuff doesn't really work. I remember I got really into Ernest Borgnine when I was going through a grieving process. I just watched a bunch of it. Is that an actor? No, he's a pianist.

Let me... Do you mean Victor Borga? Sorry, Victor Borga. Yeah, that's right. Victor Borga. I imagine you're watching a bunch of like 50s movies with this crusty dramatic actor. It's like, okay. No, as you could... Dramatic actor? It's like, okay. Well in my defense I was grieving and so I didn't remember the the the Borga versus Borg-9s

Yeah, I got I watched a lot of it because he was a pianist and he was but he would do sort of like funny Like he was very talented pianist, but then he'd do these comedy bits with his piano playing it really really good I love him. And that's all that that is like, all I could do for days was like lay on a blow up mattress and watch Victor Borja. And that was it. And it was, you know, I think the person who passed away would have approved of that use of my time.

Let me just say that. Yeah, I thought we'd just do stuff. Like you said, exactly. We just do stuff, right? Write a exactly. We just do stuff, right? Write a famous song, some of us, but you know. Yeah, because Alastair Taylor said, like, how do you write songs? And often artists cannot immediately just tell you how they make art. But Paul McCartney thought about it and he said, let's demonstrate it by doing it.

And so McCartney sat at a piano and he said, what I usually do is kind of write the music and just say some filler words to fill that out and then write lyrics later. Like the lyrics and that concept comes later. It's the tunes first for me, Paul McCartney. If people don't know, it's kind of one of the biggest interesting creative things with McCartney and Lennon. Lennon would often have kind of a lyrical idea first or a concept he wanted to make a song about. Yeah, and Paul McCartney was just like, gotta have a bop, gotta have that beat. Yeah, yeah.

McCartney said, I'm just gonna start noodling on the piano. Let's do truly just word association. Like I say a word, you say a word, it reminds you of like a psychologist or something Right and that very basic word association became The structure of actual lyrics for the song. Hello. Goodbye where there's a lot of just words that are opposites of each other There's not a lot more to it Literally, they say in the song like you say stop I say go yeah Yeah, you know and and then the music is kind of a meat there. And this also speaks

to McCartney's whole process. He was telling the truth. Sometimes his filler words become a finished song. There's a song called All Together Now in the Yellow Submarine Song Track that's even more just words. And the other example Beatlesheads are excited about is a song that originally had these lyrics. Here we go. Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs. And then later that became the iconic and beautiful song Yesterday,

because he totally did better lyrics later. I'm more emotional about the scrambled eggs though, like, and loving legs. I relate to that more. Yeah, kind of me too. You know, that was a way to get a song and also the Beatles were able to have a Christmas single for 1967 because they did that the month or two before. If people have seen the movie Love Actually or Live in the UK, but they may know there's sort of a contest in the UK to have the top selling single at Christmas. And the Beatles had won that in 1963, 64, 65 and Hello Goodbye won it in 1967 because it was just a song they had even even though things were a little turbulent.

And of course they were busy being hugely famous Beatles. I think sometimes the emotion behind a song is more important than specifically the words. Because I mean, I don't know what is, if it's a specific thing with my brain or I'm just lazy, but I have a really hard time remembering lyrics or even processing them as they happen. The melody, the harmony, the beat of the song really occupies my attention.

I can remember that quite well, but both noticing the lyrics, understanding them and remembering them just is kind of a challenge for me. I have to really actively try to do that. You know, so for me, I feel like it's like I'm listening to a song. The lyrics can be terrible and corny, but if it's got a good melody and a good rhythm, like I can get really emotional about it. I get that. Yeah, I feel like also I'll just like start to notice lyrics in later listens more often than the first listen and Yeah, we all kind of receive songs differently and so it can just be filler words

In the finished products and hello. Goodbye is an amazing example of that Yeah, yeah, they updated it but not a lot. They were like this kind of works and great. Yeah And john lennon later called the song quote three minutes of contradictions and meaningless juxtapositions. Well. Because the song was co-credited to them both, but in the later Beatles run, it tended to just be one of them writing because they were both busy. And so Lennon never thought it was much. But I think he's half right.

There's also something there. They did turn it into like a duality kind of meaning where there's something. I think it's interesting given what you said earlier where Lennon really had this idea of making sure that there's some significance before just noodling around. Personally, I like noodling. I think that it's underrated. And especially if you have the mind of Paul McCartney where he's like the greatest noodler in a couple centuries. Right, greatest noodler of a couple centuries. So why would you skip that ability, you know? Like do it.

Right, yeah. That's a couple of takeaways and lots of numbers about this word hello. Let's say hello goodbye real quick and then come back with a couple more takeaways. Support for this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating comes from The Best Idea Yet. That's a title. The Best Idea Yet, they are a podcast about the weird and wonderful origin stories behind products and brands that you're obsessed with. For example, the Fender Stratocaster, maybe the most iconic guitar of all time. Its creator had to overcome issues from chronic stress to near bankruptcy to a termite infestation.

Also, did you know the Polaroid? The camera and the sort of instant photograph? One of the people who came up with that idea was three years old? And did you know that the super soaker, that water gun, was invented by a NASA engineer? Literal rocket scientist. Again, that show is called The Best Idea Yet. You can follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back and we're back with a very mini takeaway number three. One county in Texas invented a vaguely biblical reason

to stop saying hello. I'm so excited for this. I love satanic panic. I love it when people get stuff stuck in their craw. Like, oh no, Route 666, it's the devil. As if, I mean, God, if there is an omnipotent God, he's not going to be scared of some stupid numbers or some stupid letters. That's my opinion. Yeah, I agree. And this one is fun because it feels like less of a big panic and more of a county letting one guy have his way. They were like, he is passionate about this

and it'll make him happy, I think. It's that one guy standing up in the Norman Rockwell painting where it's like, I've got my opinion, hell is satanic. And everyone's just forced to give them the time of day. It's like, all right, okay. Yeah, pet turtles are communist. Sure. I don't know.

All right. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So yeah, this is a story from the 1990s. In January of 1997, a county in Texas changed the official greeting word of the county. Hmm, okay. It's sort of like state symbols and stuff. Like if people listen to E Pluribus Motto, it's a great podcast all about that. Clayberg County is in South Texas, Clayberg County.

And at some point they declared hello to be the official greeting of Clayberg County is in South Texas, Clayburg County. And at some point they declared hello to be the official greeting of Clayburg County. It was probably people having fun at a county commissioner's meeting or something. It's not really anything. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's like, it's one of those things of next item on the agenda, a pizza party and, oh, pick a greeting. Like we in an official motion declare this pizza party day, ha ha ha, and here's your slice of pizza. It's like that level of thing. It's whatever.

Yeah. And then, according to the Los Angeles Times, a resident of Kingsville, the county seat of Claybrook County, he became concerned about the word hello. Leonzo Canales Jr. was a military veteran, a flea market operator, and at least tolerated by his neighbors. And he noticed that the word hello, as Katie pointed out at the beginning of the episode,

the word hello, its first four letters spell something. Right? If you think about it. H-E double hockey sticks. Yeah. And so Leonzo Canales Jr. started agitating neighbors and purchasing newspaper advertisements to say that they needed a more Christian word to replace hello as the Claybrook County official greeting.

Christo. Like, he didn't necessarily want to ban saying the word hello or something. He just wanted to change the county lore about the word hello. To it being Christ-o. So basically, his two pitches were heaven-o and God-o. No, I was joking. Your joke is real. I was joking.

What the, why is this guy in my head? Cause I started the episode going, hello, it's got hell in it and that's rad. And now it's like, oh yeah, what if he's like Christ-O and you are saying yes, in fact, he said God-O or heaven-O, there's no way this guy was serious. He was, this has to be trolling. Could have been. Yeah, my sources aren't clear, but either seriously or jokingly, January 1997, Claybird County replaced Hello with Heaven-O as the official greeting of the county

and put it on some stickers and stuff. Yeah. Heaven-O. Yeah, Heaven-O. Take that Satan. Got him. I, it's- Take that, Satan. Got him. I can't, I can't hate it. I'm broadly applied with it. It's not a big deal. I can't hate it. Yeah, it's whatever. I can't hate it.

It's so stupid. I can't hate it. It's too- Yeah, it's cool. When something crosses over into being that stupid, I am like, you know what? Yeah, exactly. Sure, buddy. Okay, buddy.

You can have your heaven-o. Yeah, I feel like the entire county said that. They're like, yeah, sure, I mean, whatever. I have things to do. I'm not too worried about my religious freedom getting crushed by a county who wants to say heaven-o. But you know, maybe I should be. Yeah, if the Supreme Court ever cites it, I'm concerned, but it seems fine. Right. It's whatever. Yeah, if the Supreme Court ever cites it, I'm concerned, but it seems fine.

Right. It's whatever. Yeah. That's very funny. It sounds like a cereal where it's got like little marshmallow things of clouds and God in it. Yeah, there's a little plastic, the Apostle James in it or something. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Little crucifixes made out of cereal. And off of that, we have one last and much more meaningful takeaway because takeaway number four, America's Hello Girls were everything from telephone operators to labor organizers to World War I service members. Wow. Some talented, multi-talented ladies. All doing it all at once, huh?

Yeah. Hello Girls was an early nickname for female telephone operators at switchboards. That checks out. And then they did incredibly important things from the 1880s to the 1930s. I mean that makes sense, right? Because if your greeting for the phone call is hello and you've got the operator, you go, hello operator. That's yeah, hello girls.

Yeah, yeah. A little bit patronizing if they're women, but you know. Yeah, and that really fits that first takeaway of hello being truly a telephone word. It's like any text speak for texting in our minds, you know? Right. Yeah. Right. And the key sources here are a lot of digital resources from the Library of Congress, US

National Archives, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and then also PeaceforHistory.com by Greg Daugherty. Because before the end of the 1800s, Americans were all in on the telephone. They loved it. And we briefly mentioned this on the episode about emergency phone numbers. Late 1800s calls usually went through human operators. There was just a cultural norm of making it young women.

Yeah. I thought women were involved in a lot of the kind of like work for a lot of emerging technologies. So when computers first came on the scene, women were often the computer programmers, the ones working with the computers the most when like maybe tedious work, but very important work. And often women are called upon to do that. Exactly. They said like a lady's hands can click the wires

and it's too boring for me as a man. So that's why it was women. And it was a very dominant occupation and phenomenon. Like in the 1930s, apparently about 235,000 people were phone operators, almost all of them women. Actually, dialing your own number was not dominant until later. These operators were almost all young women and there was basically a giant set of unspoken moral rules about how they needed to be. This would be illegal in any labor laws. They were supposed to be well-dressed with an upstanding vibe.

They were also in danger of being immediately fired if they got pregnant or immediately fired if they got married. That's wild. Being pregnant or married or dressed in sweatpants does not mean you can't operate a switchboard. Nobody's looking at you. Yeah, basically the idea was single women are allowed to do this job if we are confident that they are not slipping into anything

that won't lead them to being wives later. But. Like they need to be beautiful and ready to be married. And then as soon as they're married, they're out. Cause they're probably gonna be pregnant tomorrow. And so forget it. They need to be at home. What was their problem with pregnant ladies?

Just that pregnant ladies should not ever leave the house? Yeah, pregnant ladies need to go home right now and be ready to do home stuff. Yeah, that was the thinking. I think that's a misconception about pregnancy. You do still have hands. I know a lot of men think that when you you're pregnant, like your hands fall off because like, oh, but baby has hands, so the woman must like, her hands must like recede into herself like a snail eyes and they go down and they migrate to the baby and they become the baby's hands.

But that's actually not how it works. That's the origin of the English language phrase, hand off. Your hands come off and go to the baby. You hand off your hands. Yeah. Like a hands-on mother is a mother who puts her hands on the baby so the baby has hands now and she gives up her hands for the baby. It's like the giving tree.

Like you turn into a tree-shaped handless being. Right. Women turn into stumps when they become mothers. Just like you see, if you see a tree stump, that's a mother. Yeah. And so, so yeah, they were under enormous social pressure. Like this is such a specific situation and impacts your income, right? Like they got paid.

Yeah. It's important whether you can keep getting paid or not. I mean, it's less important when you have like, say, a freaking baby to feed in addition to other like, like who needs more money when you have a freaking baby though? Exactly. Right? You put that baby to work and then it's passive income for you. Babies, yeah, babies famously earn you money. Yeah, so these Hello Girls face all that and they were not able to change society's broad

vibes, but they were able to start doing organized labor practices and form unions and hold strikes and just make the jobs better while they had the jobs Awesome. Hey, you know what? That's great So they're kind of a forgotten early hero of labor history because this starts in the late 1800s there were not a lot of American unions thriving for women and in a workplace. There were some male job unions, but women had very few unionized jobs. I mean mostly because when they became pregnant their hands would fall off and they couldn't hold up those signs that say strike.

Yeah, they couldn't inflate the rat. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. And these Hello Girl actions could be very significant. The most amazing strike was April of 1919. There was a strike by more than 8,000 operators at the New England Telephone Company. They were also not unionized yet. It was a wildcat strike. But there was so many operators sticking up for each other. It basically ended telephone service in five states across New England. And then they won better wages and recognition of a union. Yeah, that's fantastic.

Really meaningful labor action, it's cool. You love to see it, you love to see it. Yeah, and then the other amazing thing about this group of ladies is they were a relatively unheralded force in World War I. Ooh. For the US military. I mean, if they were still doing telecommunications there,

that makes sense that that's super important in a military capacity. Yeah. A tool you want to use when you're especially moving troops back and forth across the front line like the trenches of World War I. The US was slow to join the Great War. The official declaration of war against Germany was April 1917. And within a few months of that, US General John J. Pershing put out a call for Hello Girls to come to Europe to operate phones and coordinate troop movements.

So how many women showed up for that? Another cool thing is women really overwhelmed the demand. Over 7,000 women applied to serve, and they only needed what ended up being 223. They really eagerly volunteered to serve. It's really interesting because according to really reputable Manosphere sort of guys, women don't do anything during wartime except stay at home, eat bonbons and a knit or something. So I'm-

Or they join the military and ruin it. Uh, gross. They're always like, they're always like telling the guys to like put the toilet seat down when they're trying to not be killed by enemy fire. And they're super annoying. Yeah. And so they helped in World War I. They formed what's called the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit, got a very quick training and then headed to Europe in early 1918. They kept up phone communications for campaigns like the Muse Argonne Offensive

and kept serving for several months after the arm's discs because it was almost as important to coordinate like the wind down and the logistics and all that stuff. And then this also revealed a situation where the US military had not really thought about a large group of women other than nurses being involved in the military. of women other than nurses being involved in the military. Right. Sounds like DEI to me. Yeah, like other than nurses basically, they didn't know how to thank a woman who served. And quoting the National Archives here, although the Hello Girls served in the military, wore Army uniforms, and were subjected to Army regulations, they were denied honorable discharge

papers because they were considered civilian employees by the army. Well, great. Cool. Like this is both sexism and poor organization all at once. And if you're in the military as a man and you're operating radios, that's considered like that you are in the military though, right? And you are eligible for the sorts of benefits that come with that, correct? When you said that, the first thing I thought is those guys even get to be one of the plastic army men. One of the five or six shapes is the guy with the big radio pack. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My grandpa helped control air traffic and radio operations.

So he did stuff similar to the Hello Girls. He was like a veteran. Sure. Sexism again, it's the dominant thing, but there's also the thing of World War I, they're starting to have technology in some ways. And so like by World War II, I think they were used to people operating technology being considered a soldier. And to be clear, my grandpa was involved in World War II, not World War I. I'm not a billion years old. For all those reasons, this led to a grassroots effort to get the Hello Girls and honorable discharge and also appropriate service medals has made sense. Unfortunately, this took a very long time. It took lobbying by the girls, also by the Veterans Administration, by the American Legion, by lots of other people and organizations, which finally led to a law that passed through Congress and was signed

by Jimmy Carter in 1977. Yeah, that's a little late. To get these World War I service women their discharges and basic paperwork. A little, that's a little late. I would say that maybe they could have done that a little quicker, but you know, they had other stuff that was important. done that a little quicker, but you know, like they had other stuff that was important like, you know, The More than 50 years of US history. Yeah. Yeah, just all the stuff that happened. Yeah Yeah, and so like I'm glad they did it and it's it's a truly wild thing where

Hello girls were such a phenomenon of holding the country together and the military together and most people haven't heard of them today. It's a really cool group of people. Yeah, as the technology changes, I think it's easy to forget the human beings that were you know, initially behind that, the original technology, especially when they're otherwise not given a lot of respect in the world, right? Like we, when men used to be men and they were like riding horses, now it's cool, but we don't think about like telephone operators, people behind giant computers and the punch

cards and all those things that actually also made the world run at that time. But yeah, it's a, we didn't highlight them then. And so it's easy to forget about them now. A hundred percent. So they're sif. They're great. Yeah. And the name Hello Girls was very positive for everybody involved, partly because the word hello is just like good. Yeah. We've all felt good about it for a while. Yeah. It's a nice word. It's hard to make it hard to make a hello sound bad, but I'm gonna try Hello

Folks that's the main episode for this week and One more time. I want to reiterate, thank you so much for being here for 250 episodes. My favorite way to celebrate is to do our usual show, because we make it as awesome as possible every week. If we could make a much more awesome show, we'd do that every week. So thank you for joining us for another lovely episode of CIF.

This outro has fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, hello is an old word for shouting for attention that became a greeting for telephones. Takeaway number two, the Beatles song Hello Goodbye came out of a songwriting demonstration during a grieving process. Takeaway number two, the Beatles song, Hello Goodbye, came out of a songwriting demonstration during a grieving process. Takeaway number three, Clayburg County in Texas invented a vaguely biblical reason

to stop saying the word hello, which Katie also parallel invented, that was amazing. Takeaway number four, America's Hello Girls were everything from telephone operators to labor heroes to World War I service members. And then lots of stats and numbers about everything from orcas imitating the word hello to belugas saying a whole lot of words to the surprising pop chart dominance of songs that are simply

called Hello. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the joyful international hellos provided by Hello Kitty and by World Hello Day. Visit safpod.fun for that bonus show and a library of a whole lot of bonus shows.

Almost 21 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonuses and then a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. It is special audio that's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include the book, Because Internet, Understanding the New Rules of Language. That is by linguist Gretchen

McCulloch. She also has a wonderful podcast called Lingthusiasm. Also leaned on very helpful digital historical resources from the Library of Congress, from the US National Archives, from the organization, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and then excellent digital writing for History.com, the Saturday Evening Post, The Beatles Bible, American Songwriter Magazine, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok

people, and others. Also Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free CIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the discord, and hey, would you like a tip

on another episode? Cause each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 8, that's about the topic of ketchup. Fun fact there, the name ketchup and the word ketchup comes from names for Asian condiments and fish sauces and got applied to a tomato product across the world. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Goldin's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals,

science and more. Especially animal noises. You only got a taste of the world of animal noise. From this, you should hear the Leku Squawkin segment on Creature Feature every week. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to The Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next

week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.