greetingstime
How do people greet each other when they are in different time zones?
For example, suppose there is a phone call between two people: one is in Central European Time 1600 (say Germany, in the afternoon), and the other is in Eastern Standard Time (in the US, at 10am, the morning).
Do people greet each other with 'Good Monday/Tuesday/…? This doesn't completely solve the problem, but it's better than 'Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening'.
How do ye / How do you do / Howdy?
From the etymology.com page on howdy:
howdy 1840, first recorded in Southern U.S. dialect, contraction of how do you do (1630s), phrase inquiring after someone's health; earlier how do ye (1560s).
Note that a search for "how do you do" in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (1810s - 2000s) in particular brings results that are from the early 1810s (see number of occurrences per decade below). This supports that the usage of "how do you do" precedes the year in which Americans started greeting with "hi" according to etymonline.com (1862).
Similar searches in the COHA for "how do ye do" and "howdy" support that also their usage was prior to when "hi" started being used as a greeting.
Hal / Hail
Disclaimer: no evidence that these words were used in America. What follows is more like an interesting note on the history of greetings in English:
The book Speech acts in the history of English dedicates an entire chapter to greetings in English language history. Among the greetings that it covers, I would say that the closest one to hi! in spelling and usage is hail! The author describes hail as the Middle English daughter form of the Old English interjection hal. Hal! would literally mean health!.
You can browse the book here in Google Books.
Times:
Dawn refers to the time around the actual solar event that is sunrise.
Morning refers to any time before noon, so 1am is still the morning.
Very early morning is sometimes known as "the small hours" (or any regional variant of those words). The actual time is variable, although you will probably provoke a laugh from working people if you refer to any time after 7am in that way (and probably any time after 6am).
Noon refers to 12pm (exact midday) and the time just around it. 1101 is not noon.
Afternoon refers to the time after Noon and before the Night. "Good afternoon" is only used after noon.
Dusk corresponds to dawn, and refers to the event of the sun setting.
Evening is variable in its usage, and is tied both to work schedules and the solar time. It's pretty much always correct to refer to the part of the day when the light begins to wane as "evening".
Night refers to the time after sunset. Accordingly, it can be both morning and night (this being pretty much the definition of the small hours).
Midnight refers to exactly 0000/2400 hours, and the time just around it. 2301 is not midnight.
"Good night" does not mean "have a good sleep". It is used as a farewell when it is late, whether anyone is planning on going home or not.
Meals:
Lunch is a meal taken between breakfast and the evening meal (howsoever called). It is not tied to any specific time beyond that.
The main evening meal may be called "dinner", "supper", or "tea" depending on regional dialect and class. "Dinner" is probably the most neutral option in most dialects (although in some dialects it means the main meal of the day even if that was lunch, or it may mean something else). If a second evening meal is taken, or a very late evening meal is taken, it might be called supper in distinction to dinner. This is not so common any longer.
"Afternoon tea" is a specific meal. Its defining feature is not really that it is taken in the afternoon, but rather the elements it is composed of: it will be a short snack, usually of tea or coffee and a sweet or savory baked good. "Morning tea" is the corresponding snack in the morning.
We are not "fixing" you, because you are not broken. We are correcting you in so far as we think you are wrong.
Best Answer
We usually say 'Good evening to India, good afternoon to Germany, good morning to America' or equivalent, or 'good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whichever time it is where you are', but it is still everytime as a half- or quarter-joke; there is simply no standard way to handle it, as it is too new a need to have made it into standard language.
Of course, you can avoid the issue by saying 'hello, how you are all doing' or some other expression that doesn't refer to the time of day.
It is very rare that different locations have different weekdays, and I haven't ever heard any reference to the weekday in the greeting anyway. So 'Good Monday', etc. is a no-no.