"HEY" another dumb Americanism. Interjection NOT G
>>"if americans didnt invent it, who did?"
Some Germanic tribes in Europe thousands of years ago?<<
If its European, then why only the Americans are overusing it ? Why not the English ? Because the Americans like the slang? Or because they dont know what an interjection is ?
My Oxford Dictionary
hey • exclamation used to attract attention or to express surprise, interest, etc.
So it doesn't seem like it's a large leap to go from 'exclamation used to attract attention' to an informal greeting.
yeah, that's just being thick
"If its European, then why only the Americans are overusing it ? Why not the English ? Because the Americans like the slang? Or because they dont know what an interjection is ?"
How dense are you? It's European because a cognate is used the same way in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian.
***I thought in Britain, 'hullo' was more normal than 'hello'
Not any more? ***
A great many Brits don't use either! Hello was the form most used anyway, from what I can gather. "Hi!" is more or less universal over here, at least for the younger people, and it takes a lot less effort to say it, so what's dumb about that?
I will support the Americans here, if only to make up for the wee bit bashing I've inflicted on them in another thread over what British expats living over there have whinged on about! You should read the gripes about us Brits on the sites for American expats living over here! Food for thought big time. :-) When it comes to "dumbness" I really don't believe that the Americans have a monopoly on that!
I use "hey" to say hello sporadically, but I say hello most of the times and I'm American.
We have a lot of ways to say hello, most of them, we didn't come up with.
-Hello
-Hi
-Hiya
-Howdy
-Hey
-Heya
-Holla
And there's probably more than these.
I personally don't use "hey" as an interjection, I use "oi," but that's mostly because I'm Jewish.
<<You should read the gripes about us Brits on the sites for American expats living over here!<<
Give us a link, plz
At least in the dialect here in southeastern Wisconsin, the normal greeting is "hey", with "hi" also being used (but to me at least coming off as more detached and distant), and with "hello" also in use but being relatively formal and socially distant overall. Mind you that in many dialects here, "hey" is not just a greeting and an interjection, but also is a particle that is used in a way similar to "eh" in Canadian English (even though my own particular dialect lacks such usage of "hey").
***Give us a link, plz***
This is the main American Expats in the UK site, the one with most of the gripes, or conversely, the advantages, of being in the UK - there is good as well as bad, just as it is in the Brit Expats in the USA site! You need to register in order to read all the posts and, if you wish, contribute.
It seems that they have people who live in America but have never been over here - maybe they are "considering"!
This is it:
http://www.americanexpats.co.uk/
There are a fair number of Americans living in this area - there are some close to where I live. You can always tell where the Americans live - they ALL, and I mean ALL! - have a flagpole in their garden (sorry - I mean yard!) about 50ft tall and flying the Stars and Stripes!
http://www.londinium.com/london/46673.html
http://www.americanexpats.co.uk/
There must be oodles and oodles of Americans living amongst us here, if this link is anything to go by - they seem to open "clubs" for themselves in practically every corner of the UK! They must like us! :-)
http://www.americanexpats.co.uk/clubs.htm
http://www.geofftech.co.uk/iblog/?p=248
http://www.theamericanhour.com/expats/index.htm
Travis> :"At least in the dialect here in southeastern Wisconsin, the normal greeting is "hey", with "hi" also being used (but to me at least coming off as more detached and distant)"
Really? I thought the post was a joke! So are you really replacing the "HI" with "HEY" ? I believed that in British English "Hi" was an Americanism - no longer as used in the USA as the new "HEY" (according to you).
When "HEY" started to become so popular in the US?
"Hey" has been used in England for a long long time as a means of getting a persons attention - so this use of it as a greeting was probably inevitable anyway. If it is an 'Americanism' then it's one that I can live with (not that I hear it used often anyway).
<<"Hey" has been used in England for a long long time as a means of getting a persons attention - so this use of it as a greeting was probably inevitable anyway.>>
I agree. This same transition can be seen in the interjection "Yo!". It is already well into process of developing a greeting sense with the same meaning as "Hey/Hello"
>>Really? I thought the post was a joke! So are you really replacing the "HI" with "HEY" ? I believed that in British English "Hi" was an Americanism - no longer as used in the USA as the new "HEY" (according to you).
When "HEY" started to become so popular in the US?<<
Mind you that "hey" far predates "hi" at least as a call to get someone's attention in English, to which "hey" is dated to c. 1225 (as opposed to "hi", which is dated to 1862, and "hiya", which is dated to 1940). Also mind you that, as stated before, words cognate with "hey" are greetings in other Germanic languages as well, such as the Scandinavian "hej"/"hei". At least here, I would suspect that "hey" did not replace "hi", but rather the opposite - that "hi" failed to really replace "hey" - as "hey" is a far more natural usage than "hi" here overall.