Back to work yesterday and wandering through the halls has got me thinking. It’s probably because I’m a communications guy and I enjoy thinking about the way people talk to each other (verbally or not), but I’m finding the notion of the hallway greeting an interesting one.
When you work in a small office as I do (thirty or so people), you pass the same individuals in the halls many times over the course of the day. Rarely do you have something new to say to them, and one tends to exhaust, “How’s it going?” pretty early in the day. Yet to not acknowledge them seems rude.
I’ve noticed over the course of the last few years that I’ve been here that, at least for me, the form of that acknowledgment has been changing. It used to be that a simple “hey” exchanged by both parties would suffice. If not “hey,” then something similar. In the same family as “hey” is the occasional exclamatory use of someone’s name. This is typically followed up by the use of the instigator’s name, though in somewhat less ebullient fashion. A sample exchange might go as follows:
Guy walking down the hall: “Jerry!”
Jerry, as he passes first guy: “Frank.”
While still heard, “hey” and its spinoffs seem to be fading from popularity. For a while, too, we saw the head nod — sometimes an upward nod, sometimes a downward nod, but either way an easy acknowledgment that passes for a friendly greeting and is easily returnable by the other party. However, unlike “hey,” the head nod bears little risk of obligation or commitment to enter further conversation.
Perhaps all the nodding prompted too many visits to the chiropractor. Maybe we developed more guarded tastes and the nod felt a little too personal. It could be that we just got lazy. Now it seems we’ve reduced the hallway greeting to the eyebrow raise. One eyebrow or two, this form of greeting is just as noncommittal as the head nod, while still being slightly more communicative, depending on the rest of the surrounding facial expression.
You’ll notice that some people will mix and match greetings. The eyebrow raise with a head nod. An exclamatory name followed up with a “hey.” Though there are some inadvisable combinations, most permutations seem to be acceptable.
My personal prediction is that within the next few years, we’ll migrate to expressive blinking, or perhaps gang signs unique to each organization that will act as markers of belonging for members within said organizations. Let me know where you think we’re headed. Also, if my observations have left out any transitional forms that you’ve observed in the evolution of the hallway greeting, I’d love to hear that, too.
In other news: I seem to be the only one who heard about this and already wore my green prior to yesterday. Oh, well.
Anything is better than the casual “hey, how’s it going” as they keep walking past. I hate the ambiguity of questions that I’m never sure are supposed to be answered or are just a (awkward) greeting.
On your other note, St. Patrick’s day may not have been yesterday, but I’m pretty sure green and Guinness day remained the same. Judging from the crowd in the Irish pub I visited over lunch I’m guessing they weren’t letting anything change their holiday.
Nope, you weren’t the only one. I wish it were the case that I was just in the know about the Holy Week pre-emption, but alas, no. For whatever reason, I chose to celebrate it early on Saturday with friends who probably did know about it. Sometimes following the crowd isn’t such a bad thing.
The main body of your post reminds me of the opening of Margaret Edson’s “Wit,” in which the main character Vivian, a professor of seventeenth-century poetry (specialising in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne), tells the audience that she tends toward a standard greeting that’s a little more formal, “a little less inquisitive, such as, say, ‘Hello’.”
Personally, I can’t stand false familiarity, a state this country is ripe with!