Why does it say “Howdy, gurukalehuru” when I log in? Why not greetings, or welcome or hello? This is an internet page. When I am dealing with wordpress.com, I am not actually inter-reacting with another human being, and I am under no illusions that I am actually inter-reacting with another human being, and I hat the attempt at being folksy and casual. Also, howdy goes back to the howdy doody club, the phrase as a greeting became passe as soon as it became the name of a children’s TV show, and its titular puppet.
I remember back when the Macarena craze was sweeping the nation and my sister-in-law commented, after seeing then Vice President Al Gore doing it, that the Macarena was officially no longer cool. And she was right.
It’s an interesting linguistic study, though. Howdy is obviously a shortened form of “How do you do?” (Try explaining the logic of that phrase to a bunch of people trying to learn English.) Anyway, how do you do gets shortened to how d’ye do, gets shortened to howdy do and then lengthened again by the garrulous and extroverted types to howdy doody, then back down to just howdy. How are you? gets shortened to Howahya? gets shortened to hiya gets shortened to Hi. The question mark and questioning tone gets dropped somewhere along the way.
Language changes fast and nothing changes faster than greetings. I would prefer it, however, if internet sites and other people I am actually doing business with would not try to be casual, cool and trendy (what’s next? zup, gurukalehuru?) and instead, be on the conservative side. Hello, or Good Morning would be perfectly acceptable.
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