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  1. NPR on what to say when you answer the telephone (Ahoy ahoy!)
    http://www2.cs.uh.edu/~klong/papers/hello.txt
    "Professor ALLEN KOENIGSBERG: When Bell invented the phone, Alexander Graham Bell, he didn't use 'hello' at all. He used 'ahoy.' He used it twice, 'Ahoy. Ahoy.' And apparently he was the only one that used it, because I've never heard anybody to this day say, 'Ahoy.' And Bell was not even in the Navy, so I don't know why he insisted on using a call that way."
    Later: "Prof. KOENIGSBERG: It was kind of a riddle in a way, because when you hook up a telephone and you are speaking basically to a stranger, it ran counter to what people expected in their day-to-day meetings, which was their previous experience. And you have to be properly introduced. And you're never introduced on the telephone that way. So you have to find a word or a phrase that very quickly cuts to the chase and allows people to start speaking, and 'hello' was pressed into service."
    1. It's very odd thinking of the word "hello" as being so contingent, that when the technology changes and we have ambient awareness of people approaching etc, we might not need the word at all. I suppose, being so unsemiotcratic a word, it has to be continuously supported by the pressure of use, a symbol that's maintained not through pointers in the brain, but thoroughly through the extelligence of behaviour.
    2. Secret fun: Reading transcripts of radio. I love the way the sentences run on and the way people talk. Novels used to be written like this (no longer) and I've noticed - reading Indian newspapers - people still talk this way. Of course, in India, speaking English, they still have turns of phrase I don't often encounter, and I can hear the accent in the sentence construction. This has particular resonance for me of course. For example, I remember reading in the Times of India I think, one of the local sections, about the monkey man. The statement from the cop was wonderful. And page 3 of the article about the guy who has invented a more efficient internal combustion engine...
     http://www.popsci.com/popsci/futurecar/article/0,20967,679464-3,00.html -- Mr Singh's Search for the Holy Grail
    His quote at the end: "'You have to understand, I have been working at this for such a very long time,' he says finally. 'Honestly, I am no longer certain whether it is possible for me to be happy.' He stands, and walks past the piles of parts and papers, to his hand-me-down computer. 'But I tell you this,' he says. 'At least now we can perhaps tell those 'No, no’ buggers out there that Mr. Singh is not completely off his rocker!'"
    Love it.

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