Hail fellow well met

"Hail fellow well met" is a somewhat archaic English idiom used when referring to a person whose behavior is hearty, friendly, and congenial.

Etymology

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives a 1589 quotation for this phrase as a friendly greeting, and quotations for the related phrase "hail fellow", a greeting that apparently dates to medieval times. "Well met" appears to have been added to the phrase in the 16th century to intensify its friendliness, 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.

Historic usage

The expression appeared in Jonathan Swift's My Lady's Lamentation (1728).

The phrase appears in a section entitled "Sad"—in the Aeolus episode—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]

The early twentieth-century English novelist W. Somerset Maugham frequently used the term in his novels and short stories, 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, and Then and Now).

Contemporary usage

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] As such, the idiom is used as an exaggerated greeting, or as a description of a personality type. Hence, modern use of the term tends to be deliberately archaic, with overtones of over-familiarity in the person so described (almost always male), or as a deliberate, tongue in cheek term of endearment; in the latter case it heightens the effect of the greeting of an unexpected friend (as in "the only friendly person here"), or to communicate the idea of a friend in an otherwise unfriendly environment.

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"), 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"); that is, ambiguity can be foregrounded by artistic deformation, including, Kuiper notes, toward the end of creating humorous interpretations.[4]

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

  1. ↑ Joyce, James (2000) [1918]. "Sad". In Kiberd, Declan. Ulysses. Everyman's library, Modern Classics. 100. London, ENG: Penguin. pp. 158f. ISBN 0141182806. Retrieved 5 November 2015.
  2. ↑ 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...
  3. ↑ "Hail-fellow-well-met - definition of hail-fellow-well-met by The Free Dictionary". Thefreedictionary.com. Retrieved 2015-11-06.
  4. 1 2 Kuiper, Koenraad (2007). "Cathy Wilcox meets the phrasal lexicon: Creative deformation of phrasal lexical items for humorous effect". In Munat, Judith. Lexical Creativity, Texts and Contexts. Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics. 58. Amsterdam, NH, NLD: John Benjamins. pp. 101, 93. doi:10.1075/sfsl.58.14kui. ISBN 9027215677. Retrieved 5 November 2015.
  5. ↑ 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.], and Maugham (1915), op. cit. for an example.
  6. ↑ "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


Look up hail fellow well met in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
  1. ↑ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/gunned-down/
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