So Long!

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, it’s Clayton from Mesa, Arizona.

Clayton, welcome to the show. What would you like to talk about?

The origin of the English expression, so long.

So long.

I’ve heard that the Crusaders brought it back from the Middle East.

They bastardized the Arabic salam into so long, and we’ve kept it ever since. Is that right?

No, probably not right. We’ve heard that as well, and it’s interesting.

You have some vague phonetic similarity there, but the historical record doesn’t support it.

More than likely, we got this from German, as did many Scandinavian languages. There’s a version of it, which is Adus Solange, S-O-L-A-N-G-E. It looks like Solange, S-O-L-A-N-G-E, and it means roughly the same thing. And it appears around 1850 in English in a bunch of Scandinavian languages. There is no record of any kind of transition from the Arabic into any of the other European languages at all. We would probably see that in plays or in manuscripts or in something else.

But we just simply do not see that at all.

So it probably did not come from Arabic.

So what does the adieu so long mean in German?

I know adieu is French means adios.

Yeah, goodbye until I see you again.

Yeah, probably so long.

So long for now.

Yeah.

For me, I learned so long from old-time radio shows.

When I was a kid, I would listen to rebroadcast of like the Jack Benny show or Fred Allen or Fibber McGee and Molly and that sort of thing.

And that for some reason, it always seemed to be the way that the on microphone guests were parting from each other.

So long, so long.

And it had dropped from being apparently a higher register of English.

For a while, it was the custom in the more fashionable circles in New York to say so long when they were saying goodbye to each other and then kind of became more common throughout the rest of the country in everyday speech.

It’s interesting.

I always assume that so long meant it’s going to be so long before I see you again.

It’s just going to be unbearable.

All right.

Cool.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yeah, sure.

My pleasure.

Thanks for calling.

So long.

So long.

So long.

It’s been so long since we heard from you.

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