I heard someone wish a friend, "May gentle winds be with you."

What a wonderful way to say goodbye. Have others?

[This message was edited by Morgan on Wed Apr 30th, 2003 at 20:33.]

Oh, Morgan, I am sooo relieved to read your post. I thought you were leaving our site! You are far too valuable here!

That is a wonderful way to say good-bye, and I will have to use it. I only know the common ones, such as "so long", "see you later", "take care", "good night", etc. I do love some of the foreign ones, though, and in searching for some of them, I found this wonderful site.

I've always been fond of "Fare thee well" as a mock-formal gentle goodbye. (The Joan Baez song, too, but that's different.)

P.S. Maybe it would be a good thing to put your title of the thread in quotation marks, to spare the alarm of other participants who may come to Kalleh's conclusion. (I jumped to that conclusion too, at first.)

Hey, it got your attention, didn't it!

OK, there is always my favorite way to leave a chat room....


"Poof!"

Do I hear music playing?

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, good night

and also adieu and au revoir

You got it wrong again, shufitz!

"So long, farewell, Auf wiedersehn, goodbye"

Goodbye, Adieu, Adios - they're all what theists might say. After all, "goodbye" is a short form of "god be with you," and the other two mean "to god." Sooooo, we pagans and/or athiests need another parting remark. I choose Victor Borge's parting remark in his "phonetic punctuation" routine. It's somewhat similar to "poof," but it smells worse.

As I was surfing the internet a bit about "good-bye" (yes, I do, in fact have a life!), I found one site that included the phrases "good morning" and "good afternoon". I use those phrases to mean "hello", don't you?

Good morning, good day, good afternoon, good evening, good night -- they are all be used as a greeting coming or going. So can shalom, and salaam [both "peace," ironically enough], and I suspect in other languages too, though I can't think of another off the top of my head.

As a matter of fact, come to think of it, if you consider them as short for "Have a good [whatever]", they become even more appropriate for the departure than the arrival!

Most of our greetings seem to fall into the category of Phatic communion, where the real message is "I recognize your existence. Here's how my voice sounds. How does yours sound?"

"Phatic communion" ?

derivation? any relation to em-phatic?

Oh yes, and by the way...

"So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, good night"

"So long, farewell, Auf wiedersehn, goodbye"

They're _both_ there! Different verses, is all.

[This message was edited by haberdasher on Thu May 1st, 2003 at 17:49.]

quote:

---

Originally posted by haberdasher:
"Phatic communion"? derivation? any relation to em-phatic?

---

Looked good to me, and I threw in "empathy". But AHD says:

phatic: from Greek phatos, phanai = spoken, to speak (e.g., aphasia: partial or total inability to speak or to comprehend speech)
emphasis: from Greek phainein, to show
empathy: from -pathy, feeling, suffering, perception (e.g., telepathy), from Greek -patheia, pathos

Three different roots, it appears.

[This message was edited by wordnerd on Thu May 1st, 2003 at 17:17.]

Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2003 10:04:38 -0600

"How are you? Lovely day, isn't it?" (smile; nod of head) We're familiar with talk and gesture that, though it doesn't really communicate anything, is the social lubricant to maintain our channels of communication. But the word for this familiar phenomenon hasn't entered everyday vocabulary.

phatic - relating to speech used to share feelings or to establish a sociable mood, rather than to communicate information or ideas

English on-line explains:

[The term was coined] by [Bronis“aw] Malinowski [1923], the anthropologist who studied the speech and customs of the Trobriand Islanders. He described such talk as a means by which 'ties of union are created by the mere exchange of words.' Typically, in New Zealand, such phatic communion centres on comments about the weather, on personal appearance, enquiries about health, or affirmations about everyday things.

For example:

Don't tell your friends about your indigestion.
"How are you?" is a greeting, not a question.
- apparently Arthur Guiterman, but sometimes attributed to Robert Benchley

Oh, Jerry! You disappoint me!

I thought for sure we would get a "Aloha!" from you!

Aloha, Morgan!!

and, in pidgin (Hawaiian Creole English) ==> How's it?



~~~~ jerry

I've always been partial to au revoir and arrivederci, because of their underlying sense of "until we meet again", looking forward to the next meeting.

It is obviously formed from "good-bye", and "bye" on its own can also be heard, sometimes spelled with an apostrophe to indicate that "good" has been left out: 'bye. Its reduplication is possibly indicative of being used by young children in the first instance, although adults certainly use the form over here in England.

We have an interesting, bi-directional(or multi-directional), phatic phrase in Greek: it's "Geia sou" (or "Geia sas" in the polite plural form). It's pronounced "Yiassou" and literally translates as "Your health". We use it to say "hello", "goodbye", "cheers" and "bless you" (when someone sneezes). Another useful pat phrase using the same word is "Me geia" (= with health), which we use when someone buys something new i.e. we we wish them to wear or use the new item in good health. Health seems to figure largely in the phatic communication of Greeks, perhaps because it is not taken for granted. When a child is born we say "Na sas zisei!" (= may your child live a healthy life).

When I was stationed in Germany, I encouraged Spanish-speaking friends to adopt the farewell phrase "Hasta la wierdersehn" in the hopes that it might catch on.


It didn't...

Cat woman was always fond of TTFN.

Those of the Wiccan persuasion might also part with:
Merry meet, merry part, and merry meet again.


As for TTFN, I thought that originated from Jimmy Young on BBC radio.

Tadpole

Popular song around 1914-18 was 'Goodby-ee'.

I won't quote the whole song but the chorus finished:

'Bon soir, old thing, cheerio, chin-chin,
Napoo, toodle-oo, goodby-ee!'

Most of these are obsolete in modern English, though they figure in the works of P.G.Wodehouse.
'Napoo' is supposed to be derived from the French, but I'm not sure exactly what French..something like 'Il n'y en a plus', meaning 'there is no more'.

It's a very silly song but in its context is quite pathetic, if you think of the soldiers being led off to die singing it.

I remember 'Yassoo' from a stay in Greece..we thought you spelt it like that!

Ciao!

quote:

---

As for TTFN, I thought that originated from Jimmy Young on BBC radio.

---

Actually it was a generation or so earlier. Jimmy Handley's show ITMA (It's That Man Again) was a very popular radio show during the Second World War. I understand TTFN originated there.

Then there's a favorite from my grandfather's generation: "Let's make like horsesh*t and hit the road!"

Or, a personal fave: "Let's make like a bunch of birds and get the flock outa here!"

Nine out of ten for effort.

But it was Tommy Handley!

Jimmy (no relation so far as I know) was also a generation later.

ITMA, incidentally, probably holds the record for the show that generated the largest number of catchphrases of any show of any kind. TTFN was just one of them.

ITMA was immensely popular during the war and probably nearly as many people tuned in to listen to ITMA as tuned in to listen to Winnie.

Go to http://www.britishcomedy.org.uk/comedy/itma.htm for more about ITMA

Richard English

[This message was edited by Richard English on Fri May 16th, 2003 at 12:44.]

Rats! Of course it was Tommy Handley!