On Feb 16, 5:12�am, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:
A boating resource of daily words with historical interest as they
relate to boating. *A daily series.

Ahoy!! (nautical salutation)

Normally thought to be the proper nautical salutation when greeting
another ship or nautical colleagues, it may have been derived from an
ancient Viking Battle Cry.

Alexander Graham Bell once believed that Ahoy would be the appropriate
salutation for answering the telephone.

Adjacent to Ahoy is the term Yo-Ho! a slight twist on Ahoy.

Victorian writers used Yo-Ho's to add spice to their characters and
songs. *Operattas by Gilbert and Sullivan such as "The Mikado" - "The
happiest hour a sailor sees - Is when he down - At an inland town - With
his Nancy on his knees - YO HO!!

Another intersting use of Ahoy is Ahoy-Hoy - an affectation used by the
social hoity-toity. *Ahoy-hoy is also a running joke on the cartoon show
"The Simpsons" as a greeting by the ancient and ever so miserly Mr. Burns.


If the Viking's used it as a battle cry, it certainly got converted to
more peaceful uses in regions they invaded. "Hoi" is an informal
"hello" in Dutch, and there is no great stretch of the imagination
required to figure that the English seamen of the 1700's (prior to
which the term was not in common use)
would corrupt it to Ahoy. Ahoy there = hello there. Ahoy the boat =
hello the boat. It's a term used for hailing.

One of the words for "hello" in Czech and Slovak is the full form of
the nautical term, "ahoy".