When Avigail Sharon answers a phone call from one of her closest friends, it isn’t with “Hello?”
“I always go ‘Bello,’” Sharon, 21, said. “And we’ll talk in Minionese at first.”
Her parents don’t get the dialect created for the “Minions” franchise. For them, she said, “I always say ‘Hi.’”
For her friend Sophia Perez, 22, unknown numbers receive no greeting at all. “I feel like, honestly, I will pick it up and I’m silent,” she said, “waiting for them to say something.”
That behavior, she explained, is a recent response to reports she heard about spam bots that could record and misuse her voice in scams. Sharon, who was visiting Perez in New York City from Boston, nodded knowingly.
In an era where caller ID has blossomed into avatars, pseudonyms, terms of endearment and special ringtones, saying an indiscriminate “Hello?” when answering the phone can seem almost redundant.
What has emerged instead is an idiosyncratic patois that denotes a ranking system of relationships for those born around the time or after caller ID was popularized in the 1990s.
“Hello” is now veering toward endangered territory, reserved for more formal calls, to the doctor, for example. But closer connections are greeted with something along the lines of “Hi,” “Yo,” “What’s up?” “Where are you?” or, perhaps for the most intimate or hostile (depending on the circumstance) — “Yeah?”
Some of the last mainstream pop songs to allude to the word, Adele’s “Hello” and Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s “Telephone,” are now more than a decade old. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking that the greeting, a somewhat arbitrary holdover from the 1800s when Thomas Edison first uttered it down the phone, is now quaint.
That was certainly the vibe among those standing in line at popular frozen yogurt spots and in parks around New York. Addie Sauberli, a 20-year-old college student in the city, often answers calls from her closest friends with “Where are you?” — the idea being that she would rather meet them and talk in person, she said.
“When I call you, I would say ‘Alllllooooo,’” her friend Sonia Appen, 20, said.
“Yeah, we have a special hello,” Sauberli said, nodding. “Oh my gosh, the scariest thing is when there’s a big pause before anyone says anything and you’re like, Who’s going to say ‘Hi’ first?”
For some, especially Gen Z-ers, already known for their withering stares, an unknown caller is met with the equivalent of a blank look — no greeting of any shape or form.
An Amorphous ‘Thread of Conversation’
This subtle shift in greeting mores — unsubstantiated by any quantitative data — is very likely the product of our smartphones, said Griffin Bassett, a linguistics researcher specializing in digital communication. Smartphones, and caller ID on landlines before them, notify us who is on the other end.
But when that information is seamlessly combined with emails, text messages or social media feeds that unfurl on the same device, there is no longer a need “to establish common ground” at the start of conversations, Bassett said. Instead, it’s almost as if we are all engaged in one amorphous and asynchronous “thread of conversation,” he said.
A gaggle of 17-year-olds, who were in New York for a summer program, confirmed that phone calls weren’t even their favorite mode of communication with friends.
“I feel like I use voice notes more than calling,” said Mary Jane Walsh, from Baltimore.
“Yeah, me too,” said Marie Penny, from Los Angeles, “because it’s faster than typing, and usually I have a lot to say. Like, it’s a big story.”
These monologues aren’t preceded by any formal greetings, either. “Or I’ll text and be like ‘You’re never going to guess this,’ and then I’ll send the voice note,” Walsh said.
“Sometimes I’ll just start telling the story — like straight up just get straight into it,” said Kenny Harris, also from Baltimore.
And the voice note is superior to leaving a long text message, said Lauren O’Conner, from Denver, because it leaves no room for misinterpreting the tone of the story. Penny, Walsh and Harris nodded in agreement.
In a recently published study, a team of psychologists interested in how we speak to one another combed through 14 years of recordings from more than 2,000 people ages 10 to 94. The psychologists found that, overall, people were speaking fewer words in their daily lives; the average number of words spoken per day went from almost 16,000 in 2007 to under 13,000 in 2019.
Those younger 25, though, lost even more words, said Valeria Pfeifer, a psychology and counseling associate professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who is a co-author of the study.
“Younger people feel less inclined to use formulaic expressions of politeness, like ‘How are you?’” she said, which accounts for three whole, cumbersome words.
The Silent Open
When Myka Meier asked roughly three dozen 15- and 16-year-olds how they answered their phones, “about a third said that they do not give a greeting,” she said.
Phone-answering protocol, or the lack of it, is one of the most consistently cited concerns from parents when they sign their children up for social etiquette classes at Beaumont, the New York school Meier helped found. (She was also recently a cast member of “Ladies of London: The New Reign.”)
When she asked the teenagers during an etiquette class why they weren’t answering their phones with greetings, “they said they don’t trust the other person on the other side.” It’s an understandable instinct, she added, when we live in a world of A.I. slop, phishing texts and other digital scams.
The absence of a “hello” is common among even younger generations, too. Across the country, parents have been introducing their children to the nostalgic tring, tring of a landline handset.
Many parents reported that their children would pick up their landline phones, which often don’t have caller ID, and wait for the person on the other end to talk, breathing heavily in silence into the receiver.
In the spring, Megan Prais, a mother of two in Michigan, ordered a purple lip-shaped phone for her 7- and 9-year-olds, Willa and Arlo.
When they received their first phone call, “they didn’t quite get the, you know, like ‘Hello?’” she said. “They just picked it up and started talking.”
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