Please hold.
You know, that’s what we say sometimes on the phone when we want the person on the other line to wait for a moment while we become temporarily unavailable to them?
My teachers at school told us it was wrong to say that. In fact, they ostracized the word “hold” from phone etiquette. You know- the normal “May I put you on hold?” ” Hold on a moment, please,” and “Hold the linem please,” were all deemed to be WRONG by my lecturers. Their reason was this- it didn’t make sense. That by saying that we were telling the caller on the line to grab hold of something, literally. If they gave us a call at our training restaurant and we said The Word, we would be given the finger-wag.
I wished with all my heart I had challenged that.
The word “hold” is commonly used in proper phone etiquette. Phone etiquette articles recommend the use of it. In fact, so RIGHT, some phones have a button with the word “Hold” on them!
What else are we to say? According to my lecturers, we should fight the urge to say “hold”, and instead say “Please give me a moment,” or “Please give me a minute.”
So, are we asking the caller to give us a piece of time? Or are we expecting them to make that particular day of theirs 23 hours and 59 minutes long, and ours 2 minutes longer?
Man.
