We say it every day. Hello. Hi. Hey, what's up? My personal favorite, how's it going? But, as pointed out in Waydowntown, you might as well be saying hello to a rock. It's just so fake. And every time you say it to someone else, it gets faker. Yes,
faker. Maybe you really do care how they're doing. But then why treat them with the same respect you treat the people you say hi to when you're just trying to be liked. Or just trying to look cool in front of other people. Throw in a reference to something that happened before and try to make it sound urgent and put a question mark at the end, and you'll really seem cool to people who don't know you. How's it going? It's not that I don't care how it's going. It's not even that I don't like you. It's just that our society has incorporated "throw away lines" into everyday usage, we can think of nothing else to say. Be polite. We get so worked up about trying to mind our manners, we don't ever be ourselves in passing and show that we really do care. If we do at all.
