It’s a social nicety and communicates that we know to greet one another as fellow human beings. It’s not like everyone who does answer is “fine”.
I’m surprised by how many people think “infamous” means “super famous,” and I’ve been seeing that word misused more often as of late.
That explains Paris Hilton.
MLS, I’m with you on “unique.” Something is either unique, or it isn’t. There are no degrees of uniqueness.
Start a new thread for that, would you? 
Another pet peeve of mine: John Roberts is actually “Chief Justice of the United States,” not “Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.”
Lots of people around here use “anymore” when they mean “nowadays,” as in “Gas is really expensive anymore.” Still bothers me.
Misuse of momentarily. It means for a moment, not in a moment. So:
Airline pilot, over the intercom:
Wrong: We’ll be in the air momentarily.
Right: We’ll be taking off momentarily
because, after the wheels leave the ground what you want to be doing is FLYING, not taking off.
A regionalism, from growing up in California, home of a gold rush: Panning out, to me, means you’ve taken all the gold out of your claim, and now you have to go prospecting. Prospecting means not making gold, it means wandering onto other prospectors claims, it means mountain lions and risky falls and you can DIE as a result of panning out. Everybody else I’ve ever heard seems to think of panning out as a GOOD THING, because it means you’ve got gold out of your pan.
Yes, this is the penultimate answer in this thread.
runs
Speaking of airline-speak, the one that annoys me is deplane. “After you deplane, you may collect your bags…”. This is common usage, and I’m sure it’s in the dictionary and everything, but I just haaate it. We didn’t “plane” when we got on the airplane. We don’t “detrain” when we get off the subway. WTF is up with “deplane”?
And it’s even worse when they say, “As you deplane the aircraft…” Even if I didn’t hate “deplane”, even if “deplane” were a perfectly cromulent word, what could we possibly deplane except for the aircraft? You’ve taken a stupid word and added a redundancy to it. Knock it off!
Airline people, try this word out: “exit”. “As you exit the aircraft, please watch your step.” See, like that. If you want to drop a few syllables, you can even drop “the aircraft”, leaving you with a brisk, “As you exit, please watch your step.” I guarantee you, we won’t become confused and suddenly think we’re aboard a cruise ship. We do not need the extra precision of “deplane”. Really.
Technically, you enplaned. And while I sympathize with your George-Carlin-robbing rant, the terms do have centuries-old counterparts from sea-going passenger vessels: embark and disembark.
<Shrug> I didn’t realize I was robbing George Carlin. I’m not really a Carlin fan. As I said, I’m sure it’s common enough usage and has found its way into the dictionary. I still hate it.
I use good, because fuck it, but if you want to get technical about it, it is wrong. “I’m doing good” means you’re fighting crime or putting out fires or something. The confusion comes, partly, I think, from English only having one way to say “to be.” Confusions like this don’t come up in Spanish with the verbs ser and estar.
If someone asked, “what are you like, intrinsically?” Then good might be ok, but if someone asks How are you [doing]? Then you’re well.
I’ve always taken this to mean that something was successful, with the origin being the concept of a prospector who stakes a claim and then finds gold in his pan, so the claim has “panned out.”
The sense you mention would be conveyed by “played out”.
No it doesn’t. It means they love each other so much that there is no love missing or lacking (lost). It comes from the original “Babes in the Woods” poem and describes how close the children’s parents were to each other:
[nitpick] In the sentence “I am well.” The word well is not, an adverb. Adverbs simply are not used in the structure. The “I am well” vs “I am good” is not a syntactic issue, it’s a semantic one.
For example, you would never say “I am happily.” Rather, you say “I am happy.” “Well,” as it turns out, is defined as both adverb and adjective. In the adjective form, it means, according to my Oxford dictionary:
It is this meaning of well that is meant by “I am well.” You are saying, “I’m in good health” or “I am in a satisfactory state.”
Good, on the other hand, has a basic meaning of, again, quoting the Oxford, “of high quality or an acceptable standard.” A good job, for example. Saying, “I am good” is like saying “I am an acceptable human being.”
That being said, languages are descriptive and not prescriptive, so, again, if people want to say “I am good” to mean “I am well” they are free to do so.
[/nitpick]
Actually, as I have always heard “pan out” used (and, for that matter, defined), it is intrinsically neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It merely means, again quoting my little Oxford pocket dictionary, “(informal) (of events or a situtation) to develop in a particular way.” The example given is also the context in which is often used: “I’m happy with the way things have panned out.” The “good” is not intrinsic to the phrasal verb “pan out,” rather, we infer that it was good from the fact that the speaker is happy. You could also use it in the sentence, “I was disappointed with the way things panned out.” In this instance, we can infer that something bad happened. It could even be relatively neutral like, “Things panned out surprisingly.” This could be good, bad, or neutral.
That being said, although it is not in my pocket dictionary, a check on Merriam-Webster Online gives an additional definition of “to succeed.” It also states that this usage dates to 1868, after the Gold Rush, of the late 40s and early 50s, but not long after. The oldest written record found may not be the oldest written record, and it doesn’t cover the fact that many colloquialisms, by their very nature, don’t get used in writing until long after they are coined. I would WAG that “pan out” is in reference to the fact that you pan gold out of water and soil. So panning out, in this sense, means to bear fruit; succeed. If you pan out, you just panned some gold out of that thar muck.
ETA: Sorry for the double post 
Because saying “Generic Greeting, not requiring a detailed response” followed by “I acknowledge your Generic Greeting and I will respond with my own Generic Greeting which, in turn, indicates a convenient end to our exchange” sounds silly.
Zacally. If you want more info, or are genuinely curious/concerned, you say, “No, really…”
At my school, both the textbook and the curriculum insists that we teach “I’m sleepy/happy/sad/crazy/whatever” as responses to the greeting “How are you?” This has always bugged me a little bit, since, in normal English usage, we don’t expect an honest reply. It always makes me cringe when I say a quick “How are you” to a student and get an “I’m sleepy, thank you, and you?” :smack:
But I’m just a cog in the system. They want me to teach awkward English, I’ll keep my head down, with my tail LITERALLY between my legs, and teach it.
At least you avoided the word literally 
At least you forgot to wait 5 minutes after a post before quoting it.
:smack: