That’s a terrible way to open an article. “Goodbye” is not an opener. Because, as fans of communicating clearly in English will know, saying “goodbye” is the gold standard, time-tested way to tell someone you’re leaving them.
The word itself is so dominant and ubiquitous that I struggled to finish that sentence without using it. I wanted more than anything to tell you that “goodbye” is the best way to say “goodbye”. And if “goodbye” is the worst way to open an article, an exercise in unhelpful recursion has got to be somewhere near second.
One way to avoid this sort of redundancy is to use the more technical term “valediction”, a word meaning “an act of bidding farewell or taking leave” (we could also use “bidding farewell”, now that the dictionary so rudely points it out to me). “Valediction” comes from the Latin vale dicere (“to say farewell”), and it’s the opposite of the moderately-more-familiar “salutation”.
We in English have many of these valedictions: “see ya”, “later!”, “have a good one”. “Best wishes” suffices if you’re writing a semi-formal email or you’d like to let your recipient know you’re a superstitious person. Alternatively, “best” is also acceptable from those who would like to remain mysterious. Best what? We’ll never know.
In some circumstances, valediction standards are more stringent. Those who write to (his majesty) King Charles III of the British Commonwealth are (humbly) asked to open their letters with a polite “Sir” but to end them with “I have the honour to be, Sir, Your Majesty’s humble and obedient servant”. I used to sign my letters to Santa the same way.
But far and away the most famous, and arguably the default, of these parting messages is “goodbye”.
In spite of its apparent ubiquity, it might be surprising to learn that the word itself is relatively new. It’s hard to identify the precise moment “goodbye” said “hello”, but it doesn’t appear in text by that spelling before 1707. Other variants (godbwye, godbu’y) show up slightly earlier, but it’s all static before 1500.
The only constant in language is change, and words have to come from somewhere. So the idea that “goodbye” by our modern spelling is only, at best, a few hundred years old, isn’t entirely shocking. Bear with me, though. It’s at the root of this emergence that things start to get more interesting.
When we say “goodbye” today, we’re using one word to mean one thing. But before the 16th century, the ancestors of our modern “goodbye” weren’t individual words, but a phrase: “God be with ye”.
Over the years, this phrase became shortened and mangled by the busy tongues of those who spoke it. The phrase, obviously originally a Christian blessing, quickly became a way to say farewell, and as speakers came to use it more frequently, they came too to shorten it.
“God be with ye” became “God be wi’ ye” became “God bwy yee” became “godbwye” became “godby”.
These jumps wouldn’t have been as straightforward or as linear as I present them here — transitions in language rarely are. But they present a general plan for the development of a fairly modern word from its phrase of origin.
Of course, eagle-eyed readers and Sesame Street’s proudest fans of the letters “o” and “e” will notice that our journey isn’t complete. “Godby” isn’t “goodbye”.
Folk etymologies
You’d be forgiven for neglecting to assume that the “good” in “goodbye” used to be “god”, because it’s not “god”, it’s “good”, and “good” is a word on its own.
This isn’t just my poorly-exercised attempt at reaching my word count goal; it’s also not far off from the thought process that led to this shift to begin with.
“Goodbye” comes from “God be with ye”, but its partner greetings “good morning” and “good night” obviously don’t come from “god morning” or “god night”. Rather, each one of these lesser greetings is a simple phrase composed of a noun and the adjective that modifies that noun. You’re audibly wishing (or ordering) a good day upon someone.
And so, if you’re constantly wishing or being wished a good morning or good night, you might also assume you’re being wished a good bye, even if you can’t quite define what a “bye” is.
But “good bye” didn’t need to make sense, it just had to feel right. Languages are held together by little assumptions like these, the fungal mycelia that connect verbal ideas in real time. Often, the little connections and assumptions that we make about the words we speak are accurate. Sometimes, they’re not.
In cases like these, we call these faulty assumptions “folk etymologies”, little quirks that leave our language misshapen in ways that make it more comfortably accessible to us.
One example is “cockroach”. Originally a direct borrowing from the Spanish “cucaracha” (of la cucaracha fame), earlier English speakers instead assumed that this maligned insect’s name drew from two unrelated animals, the cock (male chicken of “a-doodle-doo” fame) and the roach (a fish that has long since lost the title of “most famous roach” to its forcibly-adopted bug son).
Similarly, English speakers only found it natural that a seat that you lounge on be called “chaise lounge” rather than its original name “chaise longue”, or, in French, “long chair”.
This manipulation of “longue” to “lounge” is easily understood today; we still lounge. Something like “cockroach” is harder to wrap our heads around. But, like “cockroach” and its seemingly-senseless derivation from two unrelated animals, we might call the sidewalk diagonal from us “kitty corner” and have no clue why. Like the chaise longue before it, this too comes to us by way of French. Kitty corner (or catty corner) is a corruption of “cater corner”, itself a corruption of “quatre corner”, “quatre” being French for “four” and a reference to the four corners of the intersecting streets.
I can keep going: The idea of a “pea” (the vegetable and diagnostic aid for princesses with sensory processing disorder) is, in English, a relatively modern invention. Originally, each one of these individual vegetable units was known as a “pease”, but over time, the “s” ending sound seemed to imply that the word was plural, thus implying that one “pease” was two “peas” and eventually giving way to the singular pea.
Folk etymologies occur because we learn words semantically and naturally make associations or assume connections between them. It seems only natural that “female” is derived from “male”, but the two actually have disparate origins. “Female” comes from the Latin “femella”, itself a diminutive form of “femina”, the Latin word for woman. “Male”, meanwhile, also comes from Latin, this time from “masculus”, meaning man via the Old French “masle”.
If you’re assuming that this particular linguistic misjudgment comes from “woman” deriving from “man”, you’re also off the mark. “Man” originally referred to humans of either masculine or feminine gender, an etymology reflected in words such as “mankind”. A feminine human would have been called a “wif” (the origin of “wife”), or a “wifman”, the word that, over time, became “woman”. Masculine humans, meanwhile, would have been known as “wer”, a word that’s since fallen out of use but maintains a vestigial memory in English in words like “werewolf” (or “man wolf”).
So, while it’s not accurate that the words “woman” or “female” arise out of a sexist, secondary-sex derivation from their masculine counterparts, this same sort of sexism may instead be guilty for the elimination of “wer” and the assumption that any given man (genderless) is, as we’d say, a man (genderful).
Good, better, best bye
Just like these examples, “godby”, a word which meant something but seemingly came from nowhere, morphed into “goodbye”, a word that better matched English-speakers’ expectations in the same way that “chaise lounge” seems to innately make more sense than the foreign “chaise longue”.
“Bye” still meant nothing, a nonsense word that could hardly be good or bad based on its own nonexistence. But that’s ok too; “kitty corner” was originally, as a phrase, meaningless. Knowing that a cock is a male (wer) chicken and that a roach is a fish does nothing to further one’s understanding of a cockroach, but that name still at one point felt better to speakers of early English than the foreign cucaracha.
This all brings us, broadly, to where we are today with “goodbye”. After all of this growth, movement, and development, our favorite valediction has seemingly remained in stasis for centuries.
All words change and morph with time, reflecting the attitudes, educations, and pronunciations of those who speak and spoke them. In this, “goodbye” is hardly special. But what I find particularly interesting, or at least just as interesting as the countless paragraphs I just made you read, is that our goodbye isn’t alone.
“Goodbye” was originally “god be with ye”. Adiós, the Spanish equivalent, literally means “to god”. Its French twin, “adieu”, means the same thing. The Portuguese “adeus” and Italian “addio” are, predictably, the same. All of these (besides English) are Latin-derived languages, so the similarity to one another may not be outlandishly impressive, but the shared similarity to English is worth noting.
We’re often taught language as though it’s something written in stone (it doesn’t help that through much of history, language was largely written in stone), but the words we speak are mutable. Sometimes, a purposeful, directed decision alters the way we speak. But often, these changes are more gradual, pulling a word from one intentional meaning to another over decades, centuries, or millennia.
Literal thinking
Let’s literally talk about one example: literally. This, I expect, is kind of a relic of my time, a sort of baby’s first linguistic battle. Traditionally, “literally” meant “exactly as stated”, suggesting that the preceding or succeeding sentence means exactly what was written, without any metaphorical or poetic license. Someone who’s “literally twelve feet tall” isn’t merely tall, they’re more than double the height of the average human and tower uncomfortably over everyone they meet. A person whose stomach is “literally filled with butterflies” isn’t cutesily nervous; they’re a dietary freak.
In more recent years, the word “literally” developed a second meaning, acting as an intensifier, or adding a sort of dramatic emphasis to the sentence.
This meaning came into reality by piggybacking off of the first through a series of errors; people noticed that their peers, using “literally” in its original sense, were using it to dramatically emphasize that something was exactly what they said it was. Something might have been described as costing “literally a million dollars” to clarify that the speaker wasn’t simply exaggerating. But to the untrained ear, it’s easy to see how the word “literally” here might seem to instead signal the outlandishness of the sentence rather than its specific meaning. Thus, the figurative, intensifier form of “literally” was born.
The battle over “literally” is far from over, though both sides have registered significant attrition. Dissenters argue that the secondary usage threatens to strip the original of its unique and important meaning, while those in the second, “new literally” camp largely don’t know that the dissenters exist.
Regardless, for our purposes, it’s less the fight that matters and more the result. In using “literally” in its original sense, one group of people were able to use a word to express an idea. In time, members of a separate group, some through misunderstanding, others simply through semantic diffusion, came to rely on that same word to express a separate idea.
The same happened with “goodbye”. “God be with ye” is a blessing in its strictest sense. But with time, its frequent use by early English-speakers as a way to punctuate a farewell became more associated with that act than its original purpose. Beneath the weight of centuries, the phrase became morphed and mangled beyond recognition, until a new misunderstanding gave it new life, with salutations and valedictions like “good day” and “good night” inviting “godbwye” to masquerade among their ranks.
Words are constantly changing, shifting sometimes to what we want them to be and sometimes to what we need them to be. Among it all, we’re left to ride the wave or fight the current.
Fans of the new “literally” are ready to say “goodbye” to linguistic prescriptivism, the idea that “correct” language use can be dictated by some central, omnipotent authority. Defenders of the old form, meanwhile, aren’t so ready to throw in the towel, for theirs they believe to be the righteous cause. “God”, they claim, “is with us.”