Hail fellow well met
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"Hail fellow well met" is a somewhat archaic English idiom used when referring to a person whose behavior is hearty, friendly, and congenial.[citation needed]
Etymology
![[icon]](/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small} | This section needs expansion with: a description of the origin and evolution of the expression from one or more scholarly secondary sources. You can help by adding to it. (November 2015) |
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives a 1589 quotation for this phrase as a friendly greeting, and quotations for the related phrase "hail fellow",[full citation needed] a greeting that apparently dates to medieval times.[original research?][citation needed] "Well met" appears[to whom?] to have been added to the phrase in the 16th century to intensify its friendliness,[original research?][citation needed] and derives from the concept of "good to meet you", and also from the meaning of "meet" as something literally the right size for a given situation.[original research?][citation needed]
Historic usage
| This section needs expansion with: usage descriptions from good secondary sources, especially highlighting changes in usage, and esp. in the missing 17th century, and all points between the early 1700s to the early 1900s (the only two time-points currently covered). You can help by adding to it. (November 2015) |
The expression appeared in Jonathan Swift's My Lady's Lamentation (1728).[full citation needed][non-primary source needed][relevant?]
The phrase appears in a section entitled "Sad"—in the Aeolus episode[citation needed]—in James Joyce's novel, Ulysses (1918), at the end of a description of the behaviour newspaper men: "Funny the way the newspaper men veer about when they get wind of a new opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same breath. Wouldn't know which to believe. One story good till you hear the next. Go for one another baldheaded in the papers and then all blows over. Hailfellow well met the next moment."[1][non-primary source needed][relevant?]
The early twentieth-century English novelist W. Somerset Maugham frequently used the term in his novels and short stories,[citation needed] in particular when he describes male characters of a genial, sociable, and hard-drinking temperament (e.g., Of Human Bondage,[2] The Trembling of a Leaf,[full citation needed] and Then and Now[full citation needed]).[original research?]
Contemporary usage
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In modern English, the idiom is defined as "heartily friendly and congenial, comradely, hail-fellow—characteristic of or befitting a friend; 'friendly advice'; 'a friendly neighborhood'; 'the only friendly person here'; 'a friendly host and hostess'."[3][clarification needed] As such, the idiom is used as an exaggerated greeting, or as a description of a personality type.[citation needed] Hence, modern use of the term tends to be deliberately archaic,[according to whom?] with overtones of over-familiarity in the person so described (almost always male), or as a deliberate, tongue in cheek term of endearment;[citation needed] in the latter case it heightens the effect of the greeting of an unexpected friend (as in "the only friendly person here"[This quote needs a citation]), or to communicate the idea of a friend in an otherwise unfriendly environment.[citation needed]
Linguistic observations
Kuiper uses the fact that this idiom is a phrase that is a part of the English lexicon (technically, a "phrasal lexical item"),[citation needed] and that there are different ways that the expression can be presented—for instance, as the common "hail-fellow-well-met," which appears as a modifier before the noun it modifies,[4][5] versus the more original greeting form of "Hail fellow. Well met"; these variants are given as an example to explain how changes between the two (deformation), performed for the sake of artistry in writing (i.e., artistic deformation), can move alternative interpretations to the foreground (i.e., can create "syntactic ambiguity"[citation needed]); that is, ambiguity can be foregrounded by artistic deformation, including, Kuiper notes, toward the end of creating humorous interpretations.[4]
In popular culture
In the first episode of the sixth season of Cheers, Frasier Crane refers to Norm Peterson and Cliff Claven as "hail fellows well met."
In music, the variant Greetings, well met fellow, hail! is used in "Songs From The Wood", a song by Jethro Tull (1977).[6]
References
- ^ Joyce, James (2000) [1918]. "Sad". In Kiberd, Declan (ed.). Ulysses. Everyman's library, Modern Classics. Vol. 100. London, ENG: Penguin. pp. 158f. ISBN 0141182806. Retrieved 5 November 2015.
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|lay-date=,|lay-summary=, and|lay-source=(help) - ^ Somerset Maugham, William (1915) [1915]. Of Human Bondage. New York, NY, USA: Grosset & Dunlap. p. 561. Retrieved 5 November 2015.
He had a persuasive hail-fellow well-met air with him which appealed to customers of this sort...
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|lay-date=,|lay-summary=, and|lay-source=(help) - ^ "Hail-fellow-well-met - definition of hail-fellow-well-met by The Free Dictionary". Thefreedictionary.com. Retrieved 2015-11-06.
- ^ a b Kuiper, Koenraad (2007). "Cathy Wilcox meets the phrasal lexicon: Creative deformation of phrasal lexical items for humorous effect". In Munat, Judith (ed.). Lexical Creativity, Texts and Contexts. Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics. Vol. 58. Amsterdam, NH, NLD: John Benjamins. pp. 101, 93. doi:10.1075/sfsl.58.14kui. ISBN 9027215677. Retrieved 5 November 2015.
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters:|lay-date=,|lay-summary=, and|lay-source=(help) - ^ The appearance of the idiom before the noun it modifies classifies its use in this case as a "prenominal modifier." See Kuiper (2007), op. cit., [Needed here is a further citation to define the term.],[citation needed] and Maugham (1915), op. cit. for an example.
- ^ "Jethro Tull - Songs From The Wood Lyrics". SongMeanings. Retrieved 2015-11-06.
Phrase appears in Public Broadcasting Service program Frontline Episode: Gunned Down (aired January 6, 2015), at time 20:42, said by J. Warren Cassidy, former NRA Executive V.P.[1]
Further reading
| This section needs expansion with: further good secondary sources that might be of use to make this article encyclopedic. You can help by adding to it. (November 2015) |
- Anon. (2008) "Hail Fellow Well Met," in Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Cambridge, ENG: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521674689 see [1], accessed 5 November 2015.
External links
