I’M SO ANGRY
SOME 16TH CENTURY ASSHOLE WROTE “GOD B W YE” IN A LETTER AS AN ABBREVIATION FOR “GOD BE WITH YE”
AND IT APPEARED AS “GODBWYE”
WHICH WAS THEN READ AS “GOODBYE”
AND THAT’S WHY WE SAY “GOODBYE”
BECAUSE OF 16TH CENTURY CHAT SPEAK
apparently the spanish word “adios” (goodbye) means “to go with god”
Sigh. I’ve refuted this one before, but that does not magically make it go away. :(
The Spanish (like the Italian “addio” and the French “adieu”) just means “to God”, short for “I commend you to God” or “may you go to God”.
And that is not the origin of “goodbye”. You do not get a universally used term of greeting off one sloppy manuscript spelling. It’s spoken slang, not written. “Goodbye” is a slurred version of “God bye/buy ye” which is itself a slurred version of “God be with you”. You can still see the second version preserved in some of Shakespeare’s plays - I’m fairly sure Feste, the jester, says it to himself when he’s switching back and forth between speaking in his own voice and pretending to be “Sir Topaz”, for example.
There is no such thing as 16C chat speech because there is no medium for sixteenth-century (written) chatting. Paper is expensive, parchment is on its way out for common purposes, and while highly elaborate system of abbreviations DID exist for manuscript purposes, it was on its way out too (with the advent of the printing press) and, since it was derived mostly from twelfth-century scholasticism (ie, how many notes can we cram into the margins of this text in tiny tiny handwriting) it’s sort of the opposite of chat speak, in the sense of something popular, sloppy, and informal and prone to rapid change. Manuscript abbreviations were in fact very standardised, as they have to be when you’re working with a scholarly community that stretches across all of Western Europe and (due to how time-consuming it is to make books) several centuries, in the sense that most libraries will contain and use books hundreds of years old for regular reference. Those are mostly in Latin, of course, but a lot translated fairly well into English, especially for the most commonly used words - and one of those would be “with”, which would often be written as just a “w” with a horizontal line above it.
So, yes, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if many people wrote “God b w ye” in the sixteenth century. But it isn’t “some asshole” being lazy or daring: it’s a standardised method of saving ink and paper. And it isn’t the origin of the term “goodbye”, because that came from spoken language. It was another couple of centuries before English spelling was even sufficiently standardised that it could start having an influence on pronunciation and speech, rather than just reflecting local dialect and accents.
