In an unsearchable and potentially ephemeral comment to the original posting, Professor Lawler kindly presented the following answer:
These are markers of social class and ingroup solidarity, identifying the speaker’s status, and allowing listeners to “tune” the speaker’s voice.
The first few exchanges in most conversations would be lost to untuned ears anyway, so these are usually taken up with meaningless formulas for social tuning, and thus no communication is lost.
I’ve marked this posting Community Wiki because it is John’s answer not my own, and so I deserve no reputation from it.
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