The nautical call may be used because the last vowel resonates nicely to make the call carry across the water. Much like the Southern (?) USA call “soooEEEEE” I guess, from the french ‘suis’ or the Australian attention attractor “coooEEEEEE!”. Both sounds can be heard a remarkable distance off.
~Ian O
And the Staff Report in question, apparently not on the Home Page yet, is What’s the origin of “ahoy”?.
Cecil said:
<<Alexander Graham Bell suggested “ahoy!” as the standard telephone greeting, but it didn’t catch on–for obvious reasons,>>
Simpsons’ super-villain Mr. Burns answers the phone that way. But then, he’s famous for using archaic phrases.
Ignatov
Ian probably has something there, and that line of reasoning goes back before the Southern US.
If you read the OED under the word hoy, you find the discussion extends back to the 1300’s. By the 1600’s the word hoy was cited as an interjection, quite often used in driving pigs.
Also, under hoy, the OED says
If that was in a dictionary, it certainly existed well-before that time. Notice the variant of hello being used in reply.
The possiblity that the early use of the word hoy in reference to (esp.) Dutch ships led to the term being used as a nautical call (a-hoy!) is intriguing. UNfortunately, early print sources are sparse on that.
As far as “hello” being “invented” by Edison–you can read Koenigsberg’s article here
Yes, he was probably the first to spell it that way. But he merely stole a common word in use, hullo. Perhaps he merely spelled the slang term incorrectly, the way he thought it sounded.
Pretty good job, Dex.
Ignatov, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, glad to have you here.
Just FYI, the Staff Reports are not written by Cecil himself – he gets paid for writing one column a week, and one column a week is what he writes. The Staff Reports are taken on by the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board, and I happened to do the one on “ahoy.”
Continuing with Hello, How did people greet each other before “Hello”?, Greetings, my friend sounds a bit awkward.
Salutations is also very long.
Sounds like a bunch of hooey to me.
Those phrases seem long or awkward now because you’re not used to them. We tend to a more abbreviated mode of speech in these impatient days of fax and overnight delivery.
The Elizabethans had a number of alternatives to “hello” (which was an exclamation, not a greeting) all of which can be gotten used to if you happen to be working a good renaissance faire. 
They said instead:
[ul]Good day
Good morrow
God ye good 'en (or just, Good 'en, short for good evening)
God save you, sweet mistress
How now, Sir Toby Belch
[/ul]
And like that.
Maggie
The Elizabethan World is at http://ren.dm.net/compendium/29.html
This was an Elizabethan greeting. CITE??
And don’t tell me about “raining cats and dogs.”
Sir Toby Belch is a character in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” The expression “How now” is all over Elizabethan literature, including Shakespeare, sometimes as a greeting, sometimes as an exclamation (comparable to “what’s all this, then?”), and sometimes both! I wrote the “Still More Language” page of my website–on which the list I posted appears–ages ago, so I’d have to go back to the play to find an exact citation. The plays really are the best place to look for Elizabethan forms of address
Now, about “raining cats and dogs” and that whole “Life in the 1500s” riff that goes around from time to time…please, just say no.
Maggi. I’m sorry if that sounded snotty. I didn’t mean it quite the way it came out.
If you had said “How now!” as a greeting, I probably would have said nothing. But the inclusion of Sir Toby set me off.
You did simply mean that “how now” was the greeting form from Shakespeare? Yes?
Yep. Just an example drawn from Shakespeare of “how now” in use. Not meant to suggest that you would walk up to just anyone and say “How now, Sir Toby Belch.”
Maggie
The Elizabethan World is at http://ren.dm.net
In fact, “how now” was such a common greeting that Shakespeare even makes fun of it, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“How now, brown cow?” appears in that play. You wondered where that came from? The Bard.
<< “How now, brown cow?” appears in that play. You wondered where that came from? The Bard >>
That’s the problem with Shakespeare, he writes in such cliches.
Small hijack (and very minor nitpick)…
Dex, you commented in this column that “yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum” was not piratical. Coincidentally, I just found a charming 1909 edition of Treasure Island in an attic and just finished reading it. The “yo-ho-ho” song was being sung by pirates, it involved piratical topics such as “bottles of rum” and “twenty men on a dead man’s chest”, and struck terror in the hearts of the honest men in the book, who were scared of pirates. Assuming that Treasure Island is the source of this phrase, how do you conclude that it was not originally piratical? (And is that a real word?)
Robert Louis Stevenson’s pirates were fictional. When I said the song was not piratical, I meant that we have no evidence that real pirates sang such songs or said such phrases.
And the word “piratical” is a perfectly good word. At least, it was used in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, and so I felt that I could use it too.
Ah. I undrestand the distinction. Carry on.
Oh, come on! How could I let that one slip by, with all the ahoys, and the dicks, and the . . . look at my username!
li’l Dickie Dirtz, you’re new here, so you may not realize this, but most of us here have, in fact, heard of the Tug Ahoy, and would prefer not to be reminded of it. A few years ago, we had a rather unpleasent individual here who firmly maintained that circumcision was the cause of all the world’s evils, and was fond of telling us of his own use of said product.
I’m well aware of that. I was a witness to the whole mess. In fact, the Ahoy part of my link takes you to the Teeming Millions page that documents the lurid affair (which might have been more obvious if I hadn’t screwed up the coding).
It was (supposed to be) a joke. An amusement. I’ve slinked around here long enough to think that somebody would find the connection humorous, if a bit close to home. I apologize if the wounds are still too open for some people.