"Hail fellow well met" is a somewhat archaic English idiom used when referring to a person whose behavior is hearty, friendly, and congenial, in the affirmative tensation of the ideal.
Etymology
The Oxford English Dictionary gives a 1589 quotation for this phrase as a friendly greeting, and quotations for the related phrase "hail fellow", a greeting that apparently dates to medieval times. "Well met" appears to have been added to the phrase in the 16th century to intensify its friendliness, and derives from the concept of "good to meet you", and also from the meaning of "meet" as something literally the right size for a given situation.
Historic usage
The expression appeared in Jonathan Swift's My Lady's Lamentation. The phrase appears in a section entitled "Sad"—in the Aeolus episode—in James Joyce's novel, Ulysses, at the end of a description of the behaviour of newspaper men: "Funny the way the newspaper men veer about when they get wind of a new opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same breath. Wouldn't know which to believe. One story good till you hear the next. Go for one another baldheaded in the papers and then all blows over. Hailfellow well met the next moment." The early twentieth-century English novelist W. Somerset Maugham frequently used the term in his novels and short stories, in particular when he describes male characters of a genial, sociable, and hard-drinking temperament.
Contemporary usage
In modern English, the idiom is defined as "heartily friendly and congenial, comradely, hail-fellow—characteristic of or befitting a friend; 'friendly advice'; 'a friendly neighborhood'; 'the only friendly person here'; 'a friendly host and hostess'." As such, the idiom is used as an exaggerated greeting, or as a description of a personality type. Hence, modern use of the term tends to be deliberately archaic, with overtones of over-familiarity in the person so described, or as a deliberate, tongue in cheekterm of endearment; in the latter case it heightens the effect of the greeting of an unexpected friend, or to communicate the idea of a friend in an otherwise unfriendly environment.
Linguistic observations
Kuiper uses the fact that this idiom is a phrase that is a part of the English lexicon, and that there are different ways that the expression can be presented—for instance, as the common "hail-fellow-well-met," which appears as a modifier before the noun it modifies, versus the more original greeting form of "Hail fellow. Well met"; these variants are given as an example to explain how changes between the two, performed for the sake of artistry in writing, can move alternative interpretations to the foreground ; that is, ambiguity can be foregrounded by artistic deformation, including, Kuiper notes, toward the end of creating humorous interpretations.
