Today in 1997, the commissioners of Kleberg County in southern Texas voted to make the world a little friendlier, by doing away with the word “hello,” and replacing it with a more positive alternative: “heaven-o.”
Which was a heaven of a thing to do.
This was the handiwork of Leonso Canales Jr. of Kingsville, Texas.
Back in 1988, he took a phone call from his brother, and as they exchanged greetings he was struck by the fact that four out of the five letters in that common greeting spelled out the one place nobody ever wanted to end up, the one with the lakes of fire and misery and unredeemed souls and all that.
He thought, there must be a better way to answer the phone!
His first idea was to say “God-o,” but his brother suggested “heaven-o,” which he liked even better,
Canales sat on the idea awhile, and then in late 1996 he started running ads in the local paper with the word “hello” crossed out and “heaven-o” written in its place.
He said in a confusing time, this greeting would signify “peace, friendship and welcome.”
In early 1997, the county commissioners took up his idea and made it the official county greeting.
If you called the court system there, the person answering the phone would say “heaven-o”!
This got plenty of people talking, though not all of the attention was positive.
A writer in North Carolina complained that he’d coined the phrase years earlier and why wasn’t he getting any credit?
And linguists pointed out that the word “hello” actually came from the practice of hailing someone you met or visited, not from the name of the miserable underworld.
That may be why “heaven-o” never spread much beyond the county.
Well, that and the fact that if you’re not thrilled with “hello” there are lots of actual words you can use in its place.
As one resident said at the time, “what’s wrong with ‘Howdy, y’all?’”
Today in 1931, an unforgettable night for some of the country’s leading architects.
The Society of Beaux-Arts Architects held their annual ball, which was sort of like a Met Gala of its time.
At this ball, at New York City’s Hotel Astor, organizers had more than 20 of the leading architects of the day dress up as their most famous designs – so you had a living NYC skyline made up of the people who’d dreamed those buildings up.
I’m Brady, and a heating contractor showed up dressed as a boiler! T
Say Goodbye to ‘Hello’ and Hello to ‘Heaven-o’ (Los Angeles Times)
Famous Architects Dress as Their Famous New York City Buildings (1931) (Open Culture)
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