Heaven and Hello:

‘ “Hello” is such a characteristic American greeting that, back when I was a child in Korea, it was our name for Americans. It was, after all, the first sound out of the GIs’ mouths when they saw anyone. Now that I am a professor with twenty years of academic inquiry behind me, I turn again to the question of why Americans say “Hello” and not “Good day” or its many counterparts — “Bon jour,” “Guten Tag,” “Buon giorno,” “G’day” — to greet each other; and I do this because my inquiry into the origins of symbols and folk meanings seems constantly to skirt around the profound meanings of the utterly mundane.’ Vocabula Review