Kingsville Texas is the county seat of Kleberg County; in January of 1997 county commissioners unanimously designated “heaven-o” as the county’s official greeting.
Okay, I know that’s not really breaking news; but I’ve been on a bit of a separation of church and state kick, so when I stumbled on this I thought I’d share.
So what is wrong with using “hello?” Well it turns out that Leonso Canales Jr. thinks “hello” is a negative greeting due to its association with “hell.” What?!
According to Canales “The ‘O’ is not enough to hide the most negative word (hell) printed in every dictionary” and speaking the word is even worse. So in 1988 Canales (with assisted insight from his brother) coined the greeting “heaven-o.”
There is no etymological link at all between the words “hell” and “hello”, the latter deriving from older forms such as “hallow” and “hullo”. Ironically, this common greeting probably has its oldest origins in the Germanic word “hailæn” (or Old English “hælan), which means to heal, to cure or to save, either in the physical or religious sense.
What’s worse is that this shining example of ignorance somehow managed to convince the Kleberg County commissioners of the link between “hello” and “hell.” And subsequently persuaded them “heaven-o” was better. Then with a direct violation of the first amendment the county designated “heaven-o” as their official greeting; instructing chamber of commerce and courthouse employees to answer the phone “Heaven-o.”
As far as I can find, this policy still stands.
Bwahahaa!!… *snicker*… *cough*… *sputter*…
Oh my. You know what adds onto my complete amazement over that? The guy who’s saying this probably has not even one iota of a clue how absurd he’s being.
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I see it in the vein of “Freedom Fries.” You know, ignorant asshats who think that substituting one word for another actually means something, when in reality it’s just semantics. Like saying darn instead of damn, or shoot instead of shit.
Heaven-o? Seriously?
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Dan Gilbert Reply:
June 12th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Not to mention that the word substitutions (I’m with ya on the “Freedom Fries” thing!) just make the person doing the substituting look like a complete idiot.
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Neece Reply:
June 12th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Yeah, exactly. It’s asinine. But the fact that the county made it official. What a bunch of sheeple.
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Speaking of ‘word substitution’ – I stumbled on another blog that did an entry on this too… Going with the sarcastic remarks he made…
The hospital in Kingsville has a heaven-ipad to land their emergency heaven-icopter on. The local party store fills balloons with heaven-ium. The little league team wears heaven-mets when they bat. And the library is looking to replace their copy of Light in my Darkness; if only they could find a copy written by Heavenen Keller.
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Neece Reply:
June 12th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
ha.. haahaa. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!!! Oh for heaven’s sake, that’s funny.. heaven-ium. ROFL! What idiots! Thanks for sharing this. It makes me mad, but at least I got a wry chuckle out of it.
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hahahahahaha
For some reason this reminded me of the “black hole” kerfuffle last year: http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2008/07/is_black_hole_a.html.
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