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Sunday, May 20, 2012

Hello Hello Hello



So I'm reading Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue (the British edition, which make this linguistics-for-everyone primer even more fascinating; the American version is called The Mother Tongue, for starters) and I ran across something I had not known. Although I did know that "good-bye" is a shortening of "God be with you," I was unaware that "hello" is from the Old English 'hal beo thu', or "whole be thou."

Do you not love this? Hello hello hello. And again hello.

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