I was lost in Senegal and saw a police officer. My experience of Senegalese people up until then had been only positive, so I hoped he could help me. I greeted him, asked my question, and he replied in a French-for-idiots that was dripping with contempt, “Here, we say bonjour.”
In this country, it is normal now to enter a shop and not greet the staff, and to leave without saying goodbye
I had said it, he hadn’t heard it because of the traffic noise, but he chose to be an idiot about it. Even though he was being rude about being polite, actually I didn’t mind his censure: one of the things that other countries do far better than monolingual monocultural Britons is greetings and leave-takings. It is impossible to enter anywhere in mainland Europe and not say “buongiorno” or “bonjour,” and it is excessively rude to leave without saying goodbye.
Of course, that’s a minefield too in France: when does bonjour become bonsoir? Nobody knows (and I’ve asked plenty of French people). But try leaving without saying anything. You’ll get the Senegalese police treatment. It is rude.
When I moved back to the UK from Europe twenty years ago, this was one of two things I found difficult, along with being less able to filter out other people’s chat on a bus. In this country, it is normal now to enter a shop and not greet the staff, and then to leave without saying goodbye.
I try to change that, but whenever I say “goodbye” to whoever is behind the till, I usually get a look of bafflement and maybe an embarrassed “see you.” It always feels awkward.
During the Covid lockdown period, people greeted each other on the street. I know why: there was more space. The sociologist Erving Goffman wrote that anyone who lives in an urban environment has to operate with “civil inattention.” You cannot acknowledge everyone, it would be exhausting.
On the fells, where I go running and hiking, most people greet each other. The ones who don’t are young, and they don’t either because they don’t know the courtesy code, don’t like the code, or because I don’t look like a phone screen.
At Mam Tor, in the Peak District, last weekend, I experienced a TikTok wild destination for the first time. The only people who greeted me were the rare walkers with poles. And I know they were outdoors people because they looked at me and said hello.
I find a paper that begins, “This paper investigates the phenomenon of greeting in English, which can be surprisingly challenging for speakers of other languages, such as Chinese. By ‘greeting’ we mean the seemingly ‘simple’ act of choosing conventionalised expressions at the opening of an encounter.”
I think it is great to live in a country where it is routine to thank a bus driver for doing her or his job. Yet I wish we could manage the simple act of routine verbal courtesy in other contexts.
I’m not suggesting we all go around booming HELLO! at every stranger on the street. But in a shop or cafe or commercial workplace, it is easy to do it more emphatically than a muttered “hi” or nothing.
So I am going to reinstate the “good” that has been lost from “morning” or “afternoon”. And I am going to reinstate the lost “good day” as a one-size-fits-all greeting and farewell. Not “have a good day,”: that’s American. I may risk sounding like a Handmaiden, all those “Blessed day”s and “Under His Eye”s. But the importance of a formal greeting was something Gilead got right.
Why does this rile me? Because the current status of greetings in this country is wrong: if a customer is not expected to greet a server or staff member, but the staff member is supposed to greet the customer, then that is an unequal service transaction. Because I’d like to say goodbye to the woman in One Below without her looking at me as if I am a chihuahua who has just started talking.
On the Continent, the greeting is more equal and so more human. As it should be. So if you hear a woman saying “good day to you” while sailing out of a shop, with the shop worker looking after her with bafflement, that will be me.
