Yo! Blair ... George Bush and Tony Blair's special relationship
Photograph: Dmitri Astakhov/ AFP
The most fascinating snippet of news this week is undoubtedly the revelation that George Bush greets Tony Blair with the words "yo! Blair". To which Mr Blair presumably replies "wotcher George", before Angela Merkel chips in with "heh, wass ist los?" and Jacques Chirac rounds off with "salut, les gars!"
What naturally struck me (more than any insight into the special relationship) was the tendency in English to make greetings out of expressions of surprise, even of warning. The OED, indeed, defines "yo" as "an exclamation of incitement, warning, etc" or as "an exclamation used as a greeting, to express surprise, or to attract attention; hey!"
The example "hey" is instructive. When I was a boy, "hey!" usually meant "stop what you are doing". Now it is the common way for my colleagues to address me - their reason for addressing me usually being to make me do something, not to stop me. Its meaning has thus changed to "hello, please stop doing nothing". Similarly, "hello" can still express surprise, although its value is now of a chiefly Enid Blyton type, as in: "Hello! Can this be Sean Clarke, sleeping in the office again?"
All of this is perfectly well and good, and part of the natural cycle of lexical life; a word is initially expressive and forceful, and through repeated use becomes conventional and unremarkable, at which point a new word is drafted in for forceful use. But what about all those other languages? Spanish has "hola", derived from an Arabic exclamation meaning "by god!", but I am sadly ignorant about whether the transition from warning/exclamation to greeting is a common one.
Neither French "salut" nor Italian "ciao" seems to fit the pattern; salut is from a Latin word meaing health, and ciao, says the OED, comes from "(sono il tuo) schiavo" - I am your slave. I don't known enough about Arabic "ahlan", Greek "chaire" or Slavonic "zdravo/zdravey" to say where they come in. And most other greetings I'm aware of are either religious, or simple variants of "good day" - from "salaam alaikum" to "Dia duit", by way of "guten Tag" and "bom dia". Hey! Hello out there; can anyone help?
