"Yeah, I'm fine..."

Should you ever find yourself in the unenviable position of entering a restaurant in the United States, you will undoubtedly be greeted by a woman so gushing that she veritably spews out the phrase 'how ARRRRE yew?!' before the door's finished closing. 

A response to the question posed isn't even expected, and whilst you think momentarily about answering, the waitress will usually have wandered off to get you a copy of the wine list. It's not that I wish she really did care about how I'm doing but precisely because we both know she doesn't, that I find it ferociously irksome. 'You're welcome' sits happily, for me at least, in the realms of phatic claptrap that nobody takes any notice of when muttered as a polite acknowledgement. We take it as read that this phrase really is totally vacuous, and one of its numerous advantages compared with 'how are you?' is that there is no context in which a response is ever required or desired (accept perhaps in a particularly wearing piece of dialogue only imaginable in an Austen novel "I can assure you Ms Bennett, it is much gratifying to know so!" "Oh Mr Darcy! You are more the welcome than I can ever remember anyone ever being so in my entire life!").

'How are you?' is barely acceptable as a throw-away question, even between friends who could claim to have any interest in the answer; do we really want to go further and relegate it to the utter banal by using it to greet strangers we know we'll never see again? Consider how rarely you're asked the question by someone really meaning it - someone who actually wants to know if you feel happy; how the things in your life are going and what might be worrying you. You hear the question so often that interpreting it with meaning will probably leave you slightly confused for the first few moments; then you may feel so moved that you sink to the floor, weeping like a small child. The power the question has when used in this context puts the waitress's version of it to shame and shows that 'how are you?' isn't a phrase we should allow to become so devoid of meaning that we can't use it for anything else but chit-chat. It's a rare and beautiful thing when someone asks 'how are you?' and wants more than three words and a shrug. Asking a total stranger 'how are you?' because you're about to serve them food or sell them clothes is odd enough, but totally disengaging before they've even responded only serves as proof that you really don't care, even if, for some unfathomable reason, you felt obliged to ask anyway.