You may have heard about the liberal conspiracy to make all Christian children homosexuals, strip them of their religion, and send them all straight to hell. One of the greatest evidences of this is the greeting “hello,” because it contains the word “hell.”
In 1997, the godbots in Kleberg County, TX, decided to do something about this terrible liberal satanic influence.They made “heaven-o” their official greeting:
Kleberg County commissioners on Monday unanimously designated “heaven-o” as the county’s official greeting. The reason: “hello” contains the word “hell.”
“When you go to school and church, they tell you ‘hell’ is negative and ‘heaven’ is positive,’” said the 56-year-old Canales, who owns the Kingsville Flea Market. “I think it’s time that we set a new precedent, to tell our kids that we are positive adults.”
The new salutation, according to the county resolution, is a “symbol of peace, friendship and welcome” in this “age of anxiety.”
On Thursday, courthouse employees were answering the phones, “heaven-o.”
No, that’s not from the Onion. Unfortunately, it’s true.
Something is wrong with those people, and I think it stems from something called “religion.”
Update: Now reflects that the article is from 1997.
While this is scary, I think it at least falls into the ‘mostly harmless’ category.
Still weird though.
Hey wait, can they still the word shell? That’s got hell in it.
sheaven. its got a nice ring to it.
Sum it up in one word. Stupid.
This is why writing for The Onion is such an easy job … why bother making stuff up when there are so many real life idiots out there.
Its not enough for small towns to just live with the perception that they are country ass bumpkins. They have to make it a fact by answering their phones like a retarded person.
I’ve been there. You should go to the seafood restaurant, the sheavenfish there is
incredible.
Would you say the seafood is “heavenly”, or “hellvenly”?
(psst – this is from 1997!)
Just as stupid then as it would be now.
That really is not the message you’re sending to your kids.
I think I should point out that this was written over 12 years ago.
I totally missed that — I’m so used to anything on a news site being new. I wonder if there is an update somewhere on whether they figured out what a stupid idea this was or not.
Does anyone know the real etymology of “hello”? It’s never crossed my mind to look it up…until today, even though the article is from 1997.
Hailing a boat.
Really?
Obviously inherently evil then.
Really? That explains the whole “Hello, sailor!” bit.
But does it explain the, “Hellow, Nurse!” bit?
Hell no.
It was originally a call or exclamation (like Daniel says, for hailing a boat, but it was also used as an expression of surprise – “hullo!” – or in the context of fox-hunting, to call attention to the prey.) It was popularised by the invention of the telephone, where it became the standard greeting, narrowly winning out over “Ahoy!”
ha i remember when all that went down. i’m from there. the whole “heaveno” thing did NOT take, trust me. i think the majority of the town thought it was utterly ridiculous…
I’m really glad to hear that. So was it just a couple weeks thing, then died away?
pretty much. only the most hardcore of them that REALLY backed the whole movement carried on with it, but even then, I think at some point you’d get a little tired of sounding like an idiot.
About 10 years ago, an employee of the Washington DC government got in trouble for using the word “niggardly” in the city memo. So this type of attack on words is not just a religious issue.
The newspeak of political correctness has mostly been lead by secular liberals.
“The newspeak of political correctness has mostly been lead by moronic secular liberals.”
There, fixed that for you.
@Mark D: as a liberal who despises PC-speak (which I thought culminated in the insipid ‘waterbuffalo’ episode), I have to mention that the right is no stranger to messing with words and meanings. Things like ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ instead of ‘torture’ and ‘enemy combatants’ instead of ‘prisoner of war’ and ‘death tax’ instead of ‘estate tax’ and ‘Democrat Party’ instead of the long-used ‘Democratic Party’ come to mind.
Neither side has a monopoly on fussing with language to suit their own meanings.
Debates are often more about the words themselves than the ideas, unfortunately. It’s just most folks don’t seem to realize it.
Don’t assume I am a conservative republican because I criticize liberals. I am a libertarian.
I don’t worship god, bush or obama.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czOrnjmi4kY
My mother always uses the term “h-e-double toothpick” because she doesn’t want to say “hell.” Not that she is (or at least was) particularly religious.
My brother-in-law told used “h-e-double hockey sticks” the other day instead of saying hell. Apparently if you cleverly spell it out, it does not carry the same weight as saying the actual word. He’s a pastor, he’d know.
This reminds me of high school, when kids in youth group would say things like, “Shut the FRONT door” instead of other choice words. Because you know, that may send us all straight to hell.
What if your name is Mitchell? Do you have to change it to Mitcheaven?
Do they use Heavenman’s Mayonnaise? When studying ancient Greece, do they cover Heaven-enism?
Sounds like they’re having a heavenacious time in that heaven-hole.
Oh Texas why do you do this to me? Well, I hopefully wont be residing in you much longer.
I thought the same thing… Not my state again!
Well, when the Kingsvilles of Texas embarrass me, I just think about the Mark Rothko Chapel in Houston… or Nasa… or University of Texas… or the architecture of IM Pei and Louis Kanh… etc.
(Louis Kahn… sorry!)
Things like this aren’t terribly uncommon. In Japan, “Shii” means four. However, “Shii” also means death. This means that 4 is considered an unlucky number and is usually called “Yon.” Seven is similar, it’s “Shiichi.” Since this also contains “shii” it’s also unlucky and usually called “nana.”
While this is currently more of a social thing since Japan is very atheistic, it’s origins certainly stem from superstition.
…same with Chinese. 4 is unlucky because it sounds similar to the word for evil, and 8 is luck because it sounds like the word for something… not sure.
same with Chinese. 4 is unlucky because it sounds similar to the word for evil
Not evil, death. Mandarin is a tonal language, and “si” (with the “i” sound being more of an “eh”) means “four” in the fourth (declining) tone and “death” in the third (inflected) tone. It gets complicated because the third tone can change pronunciation depending on the tone of the surrounding words, and so the third tone can often sound nearly exactly like the fourth, depending on the context.
Eight, “ba” first (flat) tone, sounds close to “fa” (same tone), which means “prosperity” or more literally “wealth”.
If I were a “courthouse employee” there, I would refuse to answer the phones the way they want. Then they’d fire me. Then, once the civil trial was over, I’d never have to work another day in my life.
Reminds me of a time a while back when an animal rights group was trying to get the names of the town “Fishkill, NY” to “Fishsave, NY”…. apparently they were completely ignorant of the Dutch language, where “kill” means “creek”. :P
Did that actually happen? I keep hearing about it on the internet, but I’m from very near there and I think it would have been prominent local news, like, right in my face. Do you have a cite of the incident or does this continue to be hearsay?
yes, Kodie it did happen, but not a lot came of it. it was an interesting (sort of) eyeroll inducing incident that blew over pretty quickly. how near Kingsville are you?? i lived in the Driscoll area and went to school in Kingsville …
I meant I’m from the Hudson Valley in New York, where Fishkill is. A town not very far away. I don’t like to be specific for some weird reason.
I don’t know where Kingsville is. I never heard of the Peta story. I looked it up online and it seems confirmed, but I know a lot of weird things get attributed to animal rights extreme groups that aren’t true or aren’t so insane as the headline seems – the media has a weird habit of exaggerating the causes and intents of these organizations sometimes for sensationalistic purposes, while you can look on any of those sites and see some good moves that are never reported. I can hardly believe they expect a town to change its name. The name isn’t harming any animals, and aside from a broken/outdated link to the Poughkeepsie Journal, it’s not claimed by Peta itself.
The etymology of the “Fishkill” town name in particular tends to surface every few years in the local papers or maybe the Pennysaver. This site claims the Dutch Vis (fish) and -kill (stream or creek).
http://www.fishkill-ny.gov/history.htm
While looking around, I found a forum discussion that there is no word “kill” in Dutch, but some feel that “Middle Dutch” is some sort of dialect which may be German, it’s not clear. It’s not the most intellectual discussion. My memory of it coming up in the paper was more like Visyschuyll, but I can’t find that anywhere, and I was unsure if the first part even had to do with fish (although hey, fish might be in a stream, let’s call it the stream with the fish and the town near it). A lot of the original language for geographical locations in the area from the Dutch and the Iroquois were variably anglicized phonetically a long time ago, like I don’t know what a Poughkeepsie or a Taconic (Taghkanic) is, but I can guess Highland or Cold Spring is probably close to their original spellings and meanings.
More than you wanted to know!
Years ago when I was doing some genealogical oral history, I interviewed a woman who was close friends with my great-aunt. I was having a hard time getting any stories out of her about my great-grandfather because she followed the belief that if you didn’t have anything good to say about someone, you didn’t say anything at all. Finally, she did give me one tidbit about how, sometime around 1930 or so, the local preacher came out to the field to visit with him. Great-grandfather tore the preacher up one side and down the other because the preacher, a supposed man of God, greeted him with that nasty word: “Hell-o.”
I just told my roommate (who is a christian) about this article. She talked about how it was utterly ridiculous and over the top. We had a good laugh about it and then she started talking about how even jesus uses the word “hell” because he had give “us” a fear of hell. She’s not really comfortable with my deconverting (and has yet to accept it) so I had to snicker silently.
So, I’m curious. How long did that last? I’d be surprised if it’s still in use 12 years later. (It’s idiotic enough that I doubt- or at least hope-that it lasted the first weekend, but who knows…)
I moved to Kingsville right after this hit the news and have been here ever since. I can assure you, no one has even said that ridiculous word to me, nor have I uttered it except maybe in jest.
I thought this story was dead and buried.
Please don’t judge small towns on our few nutcases. Every town or city has them, ours just happened to make the news.
whats weird- theres a website. heaveno.com. scarily stupid.
Ah, religion makes me laugh sometimes :)
Utterly ridiculous. If everybody thought at this level, we’d have Buddhists telling Hungary to change the name of their capital: “Hey, are you calling the Buddha a pest?!” Then while they’re at it, PETA can tell them to change the country’s name to “Hungary for Vegetables.” And then PETA would have to change its own name to COMPANIONA because they think pets should be called “companions”… Where does it end?
I live in Kleberg County and this was forgotten about as fast as it was created. This is not the official greeting and people of this county forgot about it a long time ago.
I do not use hello either but hallo instead, hope it will be all right in the end.