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That's really funny. I had a similar experience recently, where someone on Twitter DM'ed me, and I said "Howdy!" and they said "I'm doing well, how are you?"

After probing in a diplomatic way, it turned out that they interpreted "Howdy" as "How are you doing today?" which was fascinating to me, because it makes perfect sense. I never would've made the connection.

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This may be apocryphal but I've heard that "howdy" is essentially a contraction of "how do you do"

Edit: Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howdy

I've always assumed that "howdy" was a word from the vernacular of a small regional community in some random US location, that got promoted to mainstream English - individual words from dialects sometimes get picked up and adopted into "canonical" language.

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