Say Good Morning if it is Morning Where You Are

David A. Wheeler

2021-06-10

Many people around the world have learned to use video chat systems to meet with others, in part due to COVID-19. However, there's a weird social problem in English: how do you greet people when people may be in different timezones?

Some people try to greet others with "Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night." That seems like the right answer because you're thinking of others. But that's a rediculously long greeting, and you don't know if those are the right timezones anyway. What's worse, it doesn't provide any information to others beyond "Greetings."

I urge people to greet from your timezone. That is, say good morning if it's morning where you are, and so on. You might add "from" and your location, e.g., "Good morning from Northern Virginia". Such a greeting is short and tells others a little bit about you.


Feel free to see my home page at https://dwheeler.com.

(C) Copyright 2021 David A. Wheeler. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike version 3.0 or later (CC-BY-SA-3.0+).