What The Hey Is Going On In This Blog Today?

This blogger's late father had strong opinions about those who played games like baseball or football. Basketball, not so much. In any event, his favorite major league baseball player was Willie Mays of the New York (and later, San Francisco) Giants. Willie Mays was in Robert (Bobby) Sapper's Hall of Fame long before Mays was enshrined in Cooperstown. "The Say Hey Kid" was one of the most gifted players of all time. Baseball men talk about "5-Tool Players (hitting for average, hitting for power, baserunning skills and speed, throwing ability, and fielding abilities) and Willie Mays had all of the tools. He started most conversations with "Hey, Say Hey" and gained "The Say Hey Kid" nickname ever after. If this is (fair & balanced) appreciation for one of the greatest boys of summer, so be it.

[x CHE/Lingua Franca Blog]
Making Hey
By Allan Metcalf

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adult age alabama almost asked attention ballplayers boundaries carried college common decades dictionary distinction doesn't email english expression former found friends generation going greetings harper hello hey hi kid kill man meet metcalfe online originally people plate regional saying somebody sort south start swinging thousand today unusual variation willie won

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Hey, gentle reader. I have a little something for you today. No eureka moments, just an observation:

In the United States, “hey” is gradually taking the place of “hi” in friendly greetings—whether in person or online.

I don’t mean the “hey” of “Hey, you! Yes, you!” that we use to attract someone’s attention. We’ve always had that. This is the “hey” or “hi” we say when we recognize a friend or acquaintance coming to meet us, or when we start an email. “Hi, Sam, how’s it going?” That sort of thing.

Now it happens that this “hey” is originally a Southernism. That was the situation in the late 1960s when the Dictionary of American Regional English sent interviewers to a thousand communities around the nation, asking (among 1,846 other questions) how locals would greet somebody they knew well. The dictionary fieldworkers found 60 people who would say “hey,” mostly just in the South and Lower Mississippi Valley. To illustrate the usage, that dictionary quotes Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), set in Alabama: “Tell him hey for me, won’t you?” and the reply “I’ll tell him you said hey.”

DARE doesn’t even have an entry for “hi,” which evidently was too universal to be a regional expression.

In those days, “hey” was so unusual outside the South that Willie Mays, a native of Alabama, was called the “Say Hey Kid” because he would say, “Hey, man. Say hey, man” to fellow ballplayers. In 1954 the saying even became a song by the Treniers, with this refrain:

Say hey, say who?
Say Willie
Say hey, say who?
Swinging at the plate
Say hey, say who?
Say Willie
That Giants kid is great

Not that Willie had anything to do with it, but fast forward a few decades to Generation X, born in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, as this generation was growing up, “hey” began to expand beyond its former boundaries, emerging from the Old South to be a more common expression everywhere for greeting friends and relatives. Or for starting an email.

And the next generation, the millennials, have carried it even further. Here’s what one of them, a recent college graduate, told me when I asked: “I almost always say ‘hey’ in speech but I have free variation between ‘hi’ and ‘hey’ in writing. … I have a sort of three-way formality distinction for greetings—‘hey’ for friends my own age or younger, ‘hi’ for adults I know well or people my own age I’m just meeting, and ‘hello’ for adult strangers.”

I’m from an older generation, so I still say “hi.” But hey, you never know what I might be saying next year. Ω

[Allan Metcalf is Professor of English and College Registrar at MacMurray College (IL). Metcalf is the  executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, and author of OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word (2011). Metcalf received a B.A. with high honors in English from Cornell University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.]

Copyright © 2013 The Chronicle of Higher Education




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