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Culture Tuesday - Welcoming Visitors
a week ago
General
Signs of welcome are a wonderful little detail that differ from one culture to the next. Welcome mats are a simple one. We have short, ritualistic conversations that we have with people we meet on the street: "Hi! How are you?" "Fine thanks!", and it can be considered a faux-pas to actually give a detailed answer - in many cultures, a variation of "Fine thanks" seems to be all that is welcomed. How odd! How does one individual greet or welcome another in your story?
Hi, mister! (Go fuck yourself!)
… There's an endless trash fire that's burning my soul (hello)
Got a ton of barbed wire to shove in his hole (oh, excuse me)
Doin' what is required, we all have our role
I'm not doin' well
Another shitty day in hell
You are right that we do tend to have 'stock answers' that we use when we don't want to just infodump on others. In some cases we don't even say how we're really feeling because we don't want to burden others.
We can sometimes feel like a video game NPC with our reflexual dialogue.
We can turn to George Carlin for a glimpse of how such minor greetings or goodbyes can tell a lot about you. He once had as part of a comedy special, spared a few minutes of him speaking on the topic.
Like when is the comedically masculine "How's yer hammer hanging?" appropriate.
You couldn't say it to a woman.... unless she happens to be a female carpenter.
And you certainly wouldn't say it to the Pope... although that would be amuseing in it's own way. "Greetings your holiness. How hangs the hammer?".
As funny as these examples are they are an excellent example of how context of location, time and the recipient change whether or not you should use certain greetings.