Current Usage of "Hello"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sat, 4 Jun 2005 10:04:35 -0400, Duane Campbell <dcamp at CHILITECH.NET>
wrote:
>> In a message dated 6/4/2005 6:45:21 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Fred
>> Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> writes:
>>
>>>The Historical Dictionary of American Slang gives, as its first
>>>citation for _hello_ 'interjection used to call attention to the
>>>foolishness of an idea, comment, etc.' a line from the film _Back to
>>>the Future_ (1985): "Hello? McFly?"  Would anyone hazard a guess as
>>>to whether this usage was coined or popularized by that film?
>
>I have always assumed such usage was 19th century. I can't give an exact
>cite this morning, but I can picture Sherlock Holmes turning to Watson
>and saying something like, "Hello. What have we here?"

But that's just the plain old "exclamation to call attention," as in this
OED cite:

-----
1888 BLACK Adv. House-boat xxiii, Hello--here's more about evolution.
-----

What we're looking for is the use of the exclamation to call attention to
the *foolishness* of something/someone.  As HDAS points out, this is
"typically pronounced with strong stress and falling intonation on [the]
ultimate syllable," which is hard to represent in print (sometimes it
shows up as a lengthened "Helloooo?" or something similar).

Here's a recent example of "Hello" in print that I believe requires the
"McFly" reading:

-----
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/nora-ephron/deep-throat-and-me-now-i_1917.html
Nora Ephron, "Deep Throat and Me: Now It Can Be Told, and Not for the
First Time Either"
[...]
The clues to Deep Throat’s identity were clear:
Bob and Carl wrote in All the Presidents Men that Woodward’s code name for
their source – before he was christened Deep Throat by Washington Post
manager editor Howard Simons -- was My Friend. Hello.
[...]
-----

Ephron didn't bother trying to represent the stress pattern (or even add a
question mark), so this looks a bit odd on the page.


--Ben Zimmer