Good Bye.

The other day I was listening to Coffee Break French from Radio Lingua. (If you have ever wanted to learn or practice French or Spanish, their podcasts are pretty amazing.) The lesson I was learning was how to say hello and goodbye. Now you wouldn't think anything amazing would come from learning the basics of a langauge, but one of the ways to say goodbye in French is to say 'adieu'. This is a lot like the Spanish 'adiós.'

Before I go on, I want to remind you of the post about SHIT. It was a nice story but wasn't true. I was then informed I was being a wet blanket for ruining the fun story of whence a word came. So I thought I would make it up to you.

Broken down, both the words adiós and adieu mean "To God." The teacher on the the podcast kept saying, "To God, just like we do when we say good bye." This seemed really strange. We all know what good means and when to use it: good day, good night, good bye. But the bye is the word that I never thought about. Turns out bye is short for "Be with ye."

This is a what Bartleby, American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language gives:

No doubt more than one reader has wondered exactly how goodbye is derived from the phrase “God be with you.” To understand this, it is helpful to see earlier forms of the expression, such as God be wy you, god b'w'y, godbwye, god buy' ye, and good-b'wy. The first word of the expression is now good and not God, for good replaced God by analogy with such expressions as good day, perhaps after people no longer had a clear idea of the original sense of the expression. A letter of 1573 written by Gabriel Harvey contains the first recorded use of goodbye: “To requite your gallonde [gallon] of godbwyes, I regive you a pottle of howdyes,” recalling another contraction that is still used.

It's also in the Online Etymology Dictionary.
So there you have it, something both interesting and not made up.

Aspartame is still okay to drink. Stop it hippies.
Also, make sure you check out Radio Lingua. It's very good, that and some flashcards. They have a ton of languages in the ONE MINUTE.... I haven't listened to much of those, but Coffee Break French and Spanish, and Show Time Spanish are awesome.