On the radio on the way home a few nights ago, we had Mark Thompson filling in for Tim Conway Jr, and the show came back from a commercial break with an mellow old-school rap song intro, and he improvised his return with "Yo, yo, yo!" ... and then immediately got self-conscious about it.
It turned into an actual linguistic discussion about where "Yo!" came from and where it's at today. He felt it was an 80s or 90s thing. It was never really a replacement for "Hello," but technically an interjection, and specifically used to get someone's attention.
The other guys at the station felt it was outdated and confrontational. Oddly, they might still use it to call attention to something, or to show surprise at something, but they would never use it in text messaging. Or they would find it comically lame when older people used it in a text. I thought it was interesting that usage can be so specific that a word leaves different impressions depending on the media type used to deliver it.
Mark told a funny story about how he once ran to his car while a cop was about to give him a parking ticket, saying "Yo, yo, yo," and the cop took it as some kind of affront and the whole encounter soured quickly. To which, there was a bit of talk about how it's not as confrontational as "Hey!" It also clearly had different acceptance levels among various ethnicities and social groups, and could be used to try to sound "more cool" to some group or other, and when it falls flat, it really falls flat.
Beyond that, these interjections are very sensitive to the exact tone of voice being used. I can hear a friendly "Hey, hey" in my head (I specifically hear Pete Lattimer from Warehouse 13), but I can also hear an angry, aggressive "Hey!" that's clearly the start of a confrontation. Does "Yo" have the same range? It's a less sharp sound, less guttural.
The way that tone of voice is wrecked in text messages probably explains the dissonance on that front. Some people hear no tone at all in texts or emails, others always default the tone to angry or aggressive. Can you just text "Hey" to someone and ever expect to get a positive response?
Merriam Webster says "yo" was first recorded as an interjection in 1968. There's no way to get a good Ngram view of it, because "yo" is one of the most common words in Spanish (equivalent of English "I"), and so many English resources have Spanish phrases in them. An Ngram for "Hey" is equally elusive, complicated by a lot of people with Hey as a surname, but MW has "Hey" going back to the 13th century.
For words that don't really mean anything, "Yo" and "Hey" sure have a lot of history and connotations.
Here is another case where two words differ in American/British meaning based on an extra E: STORY and STOREY. You can tell a STORY, it's a piece of narration or fiction, or a news story. I don't normally think of it as a verb, but it can be. I would normally say I was telling a STORY, but I could be STORYING. Having finished the STORY, I suppose I am all STORIED out. But, STORIED fits as an adjective too: if many stories have been told about you, you have lived a STORIED life. STOREY is a floor in a house, and to make matters a little more complex, in the British Isles, what we call the first floor (Am) is the ground floor and our second floor is their first storey (floor). A taller building could have multiple STOREYS. Merriam-Webster says that this STOREY is just a less common version of STORY, but it always felt to me like a specifically British version. Cambridge has STOREYED, which would be used as an adjective, as in "a three-storeyed ho...
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