Years ago, Derek from Omaha, Nebraska, adopted the greeting howdy, but his wife says it sounds too uncultured. In a 2012 paper in the Journal of English Linguistics by Lauren Hall Lew and Nola Stephens describe howdy as a term that is enregistered as rural and Southern — in other words, seen by outsiders as country talk, and therefore supposedly unsophisticated. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Is “Howdy” an Uncouth Greeting?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Howdy, this is Derek from Omaha, Nebraska.
Hi, Derek.
Welcome to the show, what’s up?
I was hoping you guys could kind of settle a bet between me and my wife, where in high school I kind of made a conscious decision to start saying howdy more often instead of hello, and it kind of stuck with me for the last, oh, 15 years or so.
And she thinks it sounds uncultured and hillbilly-ish or redneck-ish, and I keep telling her it’s a contraction of how do you do, so it’s actually fancier than hello.
Wow.
Why did you decide to start saying howdy?
I don’t know.
I guess I was a teenager. Differentiate myself a little bit from everybody else. Just stand out a little bit.
I don’t know.
What does she say?
It’s stuck.
What does she say when she meets new people?
Hi, hello. Just the standard.
Okay.
And Derek, what’s riding on this?
You said you had a bet.
Pride, I guess.
Pride.
Okay, just pride.
And Derek, would you use the word howdy in every single context if you had to go before a judge?
No, no.
You walk into a store or somewhere and somebody says hello and howdy and move on.
Or meet somebody, shake their hand, a firm handshake and howdy.
People tend to remember you a little bit better.
It feels warm and friendly to me.
Howdy.
I’m not surprised.
And there’s a reason for that, Martha.
And I’m hesitant to say that either of you is wrong.
I want to get at this from a different angle, if you’ll give me just a second.
There was a real nice academic paper written, published in 2012, by Lauren Hall Liu and Nola Stevens, and it was in the Journal of English Linguistics.
And they talk about something that they label country talk.
And this is a type of speech that is what linguists call enregistered.
That’s a fancy word that means when you hear it, you know that it belongs to a certain group of people who have certain other characteristics.
And in this particular case, howdy is one of the words that they picked out as being the set of language that we associate with ruralness, you know, being from out in the country, and possibly with southerness, particularly people who aren’t from the South.
Although howdy is widely used in Texas and the American Southwest and parts of the South.
And so what your wife may be hearing is this sense that she’s an outsider to this kind of country talk, and she associates it with these stereotypes of bumpkinness and rusticness and backwoodsness and redneckness.
And whether those are true or not are up for the two of you to debate.
But I would say that that’s what she’s hearing.
And so what she’s hearing is nobody, except that they put it on as an affectation in the big cities of this country, would say howdy is an everyday greeting.
Usually, right? It is associated with farming and agriculture and rural life and those kinds of things, right, generally?
I would say, yeah.
I mean, I think I picked it up from watching John Wayne movies with my folks when I was little.
Sure, yes.
That’s a great example because he uses it with such panache.
There’s this way that he delivers that single word that says a whole lot about who his character is and what his character is up to and what you can expect from him in terms of trouble, right?
I see.
I guess what I’m saying here is you’re totally fine using howdy if it’s natural.
It sounds like it’s something that you decided to say, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, do you come from rural parts of Nebraska?
Yeah, I’m from a Nebraska farm family.
Yeah, it’s probably a natural part of your environment.
And as Martha said, it feels warm and comforting to her because she’s from the South as well.
And she’s from environments where howdy might be the word that you use between close friends or close family.
And and parts of this country, howdy, is utterly ordinary.
And it’s not marked at all as the thing that strangers say or the thing that only country folks say.
No, that makes a lot of sense.
And like you said, I mean, I’ve got friends that are on both coasts and traveled and meet them.
And when I meet their friends and, you know, they say hello and I unconsciously grab the bill in my cap, say howdy, and move on.
Sometimes they giggle and skitter or just look at me or they remember me in conversation or the next time they see me as that guy, which for somebody with my type of personality is fun for me.
So maybe that’s part of the reason it stuck.
I want to touch on something you mentioned there is that sometimes when you say howdy, people kind of laugh or giggle or grin.
And this paper reports that a lot of the people who do use howdy and think of it as being part of country talk, that they do laugh or giggle or think of it as a joking thing to say.
It’s definitely informal.
It’s definitely casual.
It is not something that you would say howdy judge or howdy officer, right?
No.
If you’re in a serious situation, you’re going to use a more elevated language.
Yeah, it’s kind of like clothing.
It’s a little more casual than wearing a tux.
Yeah, it’s not quite sweatpants.
Maybe it’s jeans.
But stylish jeans.
Yeah, it’s a good pair of wranglers maybe, right?
Yeah.
Well, Derek, thank you for your call.
I hope this helps some.
If you would like me to send you a link to that paper, just let me know and I’ll send it to you and your wife and you guys can discuss the academic point of view on howdy.
I will.
Take care.
All right. Bye-bye.
