Nearly everything has an inspiration, and if you dig deep enough, it can feel like an endless rabbit hole. Or, in this case, a frog hole. If you’re a fan of Looney Tunes, surely you’ve seen and heard Michigan J. Frog and his fancy top hat. One of his most beloved song and dance numbers was “Hello! Ma Baby!” But the song’s history carries more weight than meets the eye.
Author and unique history connoisseur Jason Pargin unravels it all in an Instagram video. He not only explains the song’s satirical tone but also gives a quick history lesson on telephones, greeting feuds, and the 1970s high-five.
‘Hello my ragtime gal…’
Be warned. The song is an earworm for sure. Pargin begins by pointing to a video of the fancy frog dancing in a spotlight. He asks, “You know the song this frog sings in the old Looney Tunes cartoon?” He then cuts to the song, where the frog sings, “Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gaaaaal.”
Pargin continues, “Well, that song is a novelty song making fun of the word ‘hello,’ which was new when the song came out. See, the word ‘hello’ as a greeting only goes back to the invention of the telephone. You may have heard the trivia that when Alexander Graham Bell was developing the phone, he wanted people to shout the word ‘ahoy!’ into the phone when they answered.”
From ahoy to hello
Thomas Edison apparently didn’t agree, and he got his way. Pargin continues, “And it was Thomas Edison who convinced people to start saying ‘hello’. Prior to that, that word was used to express surprise. It wasn’t something you would say as a greeting to someone on the street. You would say ‘good morning’ or something like that.”
Warner Brothers didn’t write Michigan J. Frog’s song, either. Pargin shares, “The song from 1899 was a novelty song making fun of this crazy new slang that everybody was doing on this wacky new invention.” (It was actually written by a husband-and-wife songwriting team: Joseph E. Howard and Ida Emerson.)
He goes on to point out that greetings in general have evolved over the centuries. “In fact, lots of our greetings and gestures are way more recent than you think. The high five was invented in my lifetime in the mid ’70s. The term ‘high five’ wasn’t added to the dictionary till 1980.”
Edison won the battle
In a 2011 opinion piece for NPR, writer Robert Krulwich gives a little more context for the “Ahoy vs. hello” battle:
“’Ahoy,” it turns out, had been around longer…at least 100 years longer…than hello. It, too, was a greeting, albeit a nautical one, derived from the Dutch ‘hoi,’ meaning ‘hello.’ Bell felt so strongly about “ahoy” that he used it for the rest of his life.
As does the entirely fictional ‘Monty’ Burns, evil owner of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on The Simpsons. If you watch the program, you may have noticed that Mr. Burns regularly answers his phone with ‘Ahoy-hoy,’ a coinage that Urban Dictionary says is properly used ‘to greet or get the attention of a small sloop-rigged coasting ship.’ Mr. Burns, apparently, wasn’t told.”
Why did hello succeed? Aamon [referring to Ammon Shea, author of The Phone Book] points to the telephone book. The first phone books included authoritative How To sections on their first pages, and ‘hello’ was frequently the officially sanctioned greeting.”
‘Firm and cheery’
“In fact,” Krulwich continues, “the first phone book ever published, by the District Telephone Company of New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878 (with 50 subscribers listed) told users to begin their conversations with ‘a firm and cheery “hulloa.”’ (I’m guessing the extra ‘a’ is silent.)”
This Instagram clip resonated with nearly 700,000 people. Many loved the idea of saying ‘ahoy’ instead of ‘hello.’ One Instagrammer writes, “In Czech, you say ‘ahoy’ for hello, I think it’s spelled ahoj or something, but it’s pronounced ahoy. I work w a guy from Czech Rep.”
As for those high-fives, another commenter joked that they definitely seem generational: “I will say as a non-high-5 family, it was funny when everyone wanted to high 5 my kids, and I had to explain what people wanted. They would study the hand and very mechanically move thru the motions.”
