The assembled participants in this thread can probably offer up the phone greetings common in dozens of countries.
Russians often answer the phone with “слушаю” (SLOO-shuh-yoo) — “I’m listening”.
… had people been attempting other forms of communication on the phone, before you started doing that? Singing perhaps, or morse code? 
In Korean, you answer the phone with “여보세요”, transliterated as “yeoboseyo”, approximately pronounced “yuh-boh-seh-yoh”. It literally means “look here”, which seems odd for initiating an audio-only conversation. But the connotation is more like “pay attention to me”, which makes a little more sense.
I suppose Klingon would use the same greeting that’s used in person: nuqneH, which is a clipped form of nuq DaneH, meaning “what do you want?”.
If an unknown number, I lead with an aggressive "wat maak jy’ (in Afrikaans, a greeting that means “what are you doing”, and can be either “how do you do” or “what the fuck are you doing”
Otherwise I remain silent until they identify themselves. In this world of WhatsApp and Telegram, I can be fairly sure a call on my actual phone number is going to be spam.
I always hated that and still do. Some Germans call my number and when I say “Hallo?”, “Guten Tag”, or “Mit wem spreche ich? (who am I speaking to?)” they get aggressive: “Who am I speaking to? What kind of greeting is that? Who are you?!?!” When I then point out that they have called the numer, my number, and that they should know who they want to speak to and say so, if they are so kind, while I have no idea who they are or what they want until they say so, which I expect them to do now or will hang up. And sometimes they have hung up. That has been going on for decades.
Fortunately almost nobody calls me anymore. I guess that apart from my wife I am under ten calls per year.
In Spain the usual answer is: “Digame”, which is literally “say me”, meaning “talk to me”. A bad dad joke on that is to answer “Me”.
Yes, Johanna knows that. They were explaining the etymology. I always wondered, and it makes total sense.
I thought all Spanish speakers said “Hola” in informal settings, like we do in Argentina, ignorance fought.
Who’s interrupting?
We vacation often in Bodega Bay, California. I’m familiar with all the history of the town’s being used as the setting in The Birds. But I only recently came across this factoid:
In the late 1950s, PG&E wanted to build a nuclear power plant in Bodega Bay. They chose the far end of a long peninsula known as Bodega Head, and started to dig a big pit as the basis of the plant. Sonoma County residents vehemently opposed it, but only when it was pointed out to PG&E that their chosen location was directly on top of the San Andreas Fault did they finally give up in 1964. But the pit remained, and is still there on Bodega Head, now filled with water and reeds. I’ve seen it often, and wondered why it was called “The Hole In The Head.” Now I know.
Turns out “Rohit” and “Rohan” are entirely distinct names (in Sanskrit/Hindi).
Rohit means “red” (and is a cognate of that English word).
Rohan means “growing, rising,” and is a cognate of the Latin root of English “liberty,” as well as the German word for “people” (leute).
I always assumed one was a nickname for the other, like “John” and “Johnny,” but no — you really have to make the effort to get it right with each individual. I will do so from now on.
In the Paramount + Series School Spirits, the school grounds were originally a colony of Finnish settlers. Rainbow Wedell, who plays mean girl Claire Zomer, is presumably black, but is actually Finnish/Vanuatu. Vanuatu is a Pacific island country northeast of Australia, where she grew up.
In one episode, she recognizes something written in Finnish, and she’s fluent in the language because of her Finn grandmother. It seemed kind of a stretch that a person of her heritage would know Finnish, but she actually does in real life, and is also fluent in Australian Sign Language. Mind blown.
On a bus this weekend, I passed a church I meant to post about before, but forgot: Christ Church, Brixton Road, Lambeth (London). This church has (maybe*) the only outside pulpit I have ever seen.
This article has pictures of a number of outside/exterior pulpits, including that of Christ Church - there are a few around - this wiki commons lists 29
The curious thing about Christ Church on Brixton Road is that if someone was preaching, the audience would be standing on the sidewalk of a main road in central London. Of course, traffic would have been less noisy when it was built, but I can’t see that it was ever the perfect place to listen to a sermon.
The pulpit is the nearest point of the body of the church.
j
* - I’m wondering if the pope’s balcony in the Vatican counts. I’ve seen that, pope and all (by accident.)
You don’t have to travel far to see another. Exterior pulpits in London were apparently a thing for about fifteen minutes in 1902.
Yeah, there’s a photo at the wiki commons link. Also another in Golders Green (London).
The Piccadilly one doesn’t sound too onerous to check out.
j
The Y chromosome is the only chromosome that can be lost without killing the cell.
That sounds a lot like the “Half Lives” story in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. (Minus the corporate assassins.)
I think that, as a young child in Arizona, I was taught to answer the phone with my phone number “five five five nine one two three”
Later on, we used the format “~surname~ residence, ~Melbourne~ speaking.”
My father’s phone manner was concise and to-the-point. In Australia, phones were a less important part of business and personal culture, and the polite format was less informative and more discursive.
Perhaps not. I’ve read reports that road traffic in parts of Melbourne was so loud that you couldn’t talk. That’s shod horses on pavement.
On the other hand, foot traffic in shopping areas close to railway stations was so tight that you couldn’t light a cigarette: there may have been many more people around that location.
When I was young, the telephones in the nearest town (I lived on a farm/ranch out in the country and we didn’t have a telephone until I was in high school), had 1 or 2 digit numbers. That makes the advertisements in the back of the old yearbooks for the local school particularly interesting.
By the way, our wealthiest neighbor had two telephones in his house. We were about an equal distance from four towns. He had one telephone from one town that covered our community.
However, the lines from another town ran down a highway a mile away and so he ran his own line across the pasture from the highway to his house so he could call that town pretty easily.
As he got old, his mind started to slip and so him and his wife moved out to their ranch across the county (something like 15 or 16 square miles) where he could find his way around easier.
One day, his grandson had to go over to his house to do something and I went with him. His grandson showed me his office (one of the nicest I’ve ever seen) and the two telephones on the desk. So we each picked up a telephone and dialed the operator and then held the handpieces up to each other so that the two operators could talk to each other. That really confused them.