Every day is a learning day on the Internet. Last week, people learned what “Google” actually means, and yesterday people learned there’s a single word for “the day after tomorrow“.
Today, people are learning that just as “bye” is a contraction of “goodbye”, “goodbye” is a contraction too. In its original form, the word was written in various different ways, such as “godbwyes” in the sentence “to requite your gallonde of godbwyes, I regive you a pottle of howedyes” written in 1575, and “God buoye”, as written in 1599.
By the 1700s, this had morphed into its more familiar spelling, as used in the 1707 sentence “How! gone a Hundred Mile and ne’er bid one Good bye.”
So, what is it contracted from? As people learned from X (Twitter) user abby4thepeople, it is short for “God be with you”.
According to Dictionary.com, the phrase was used to wish God to look after the person until the two meet again as, without modern ways of communicating, it was less easy to know when you would meet them again. The word has since lost that meaning, and is just a way of expressing good wishes as you part.
While we are talking greetings, “hello” has been around for a surprisingly short amount of time, and wasn’t really used as it is today until the invention of the telephone. In its original use, “hello” (or “hallo”, and even “holla”) was used as a way of attracting attention, or as an expression of surprise, rather than as a greeting.
However, when the telephone was invented, Thomas Edison originally planned on having the lines permanently open (business to business), and allow users to attract the attention of the people on the other end of the line.
“Friend David,” Edison wrote to a colleague, “I don’t think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What do you think?”
Edison popularized this greeting, which caught on amongst the population. A rival greeting, proposed by Alexander Graham Bell, was “ahoy”. This was a nautical greeting coming from the Dutch “hoi”. Unfortunately, it didn’t catch on, and we now say “hello” to greet people rather than the far more piratey “ahoy”.
