Wonder Woman Doesn't Say Hello
In the third issue of Final Crisis (2008) by Grant Morrison and JG Jones, Wonder Woman, fighting Mary Marvel, exclaims “Hola!”
Morrison uses it again in last week’s Wonder Woman Earth One vol. 3:
To my American eyes, it looks very much like Wonder Woman really likes to say “hello” to people she’s fighting. In actuality, she’s using a battlecry first seen (I think) in Wonder Woman 1. (She appeared prior to that in All Star Comics 8 and Sensation Comics. WW shows an expanded version of her ASC origin.)
Okay, so if Wonder Woman used this battlecry in her early appearances, then where did author William Moulton Marston get it from? Turns out this is incredibly hard to find on search engines. “Amazon” is an internet company, “hola” is a common Spanish word, and Wonder Woman has a recent movie out, all of which gunk up the results. The best I’ve been able to find—my guess for the moment—is the Ancient Greek battlecry “alala,” which relates to a goddess, niece of Ares, who personified war. Maybe it got transliterated to “hola” at some point and Marston picked it up from there?
I’d love to hear other theories as to why the Amazons in DC Comics use this particular exclamation.