It feels as if "hello" is fading out again. It was never completely universal. Where I grew up, people still say "aye aye" (not on a ship btw), along with the usual "good whatever".

I did once read a Christian complaining about it because it had the word "Hell" in it. A minority opinion of course.

Interesting read. How we got the word “goodbye” is also a cool story.

One advantage of using hello as a greeting is that it is agnostic of social rank. This made it the perfect choice for greeting people of unknown social rank on the phone.

Having traveled the world quite a bit I can attest to the ubiquity of the word hello… almost everywhere I go it is understood. ‘OK’ has a similar ubiquity, and it is interesting that both words are relatively new additions to the English (universal?) language.