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Comment by throw0101d | Hacker News Reader

> Tangential - your last line made me think about what "Fare well" means.

Fare is unrelated to fair:

> From Middle English farewel, from fare wel! (and the variants with the personal pronoun "fare ye well" and "fare you well" used in the Renaissance), an imperative expression, possibly further derived from Old English far wel!, equivalent to fare (“to fare, travel, journey”) +‎ well.*

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/farewell#Etymology

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fare

So to say "farewell" to someones is "have a good journey (in life?)".

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In German there's a similar word, "fahren", which means driving or traveling. In Dutch the word "varen" mean to sail or in an older sense of the word "to move".

I can only assume, but considering the Dutch "vaarwel" is so close to English, I'm going to guess it means "Go well" - or more poetically when speaking of one's path in life: may fate treat you well.

The Dutch word "welvarend" (literally "well-sailing") translates to "prosperous" in English. So "vaarwel" or "farewell" is kind of a medieval way of saying "live long and prosper". :-)

There's also welfare and Wohlfahrt in German.

> Fare is unrelated to fair

True, but ‘fair well’ was likely just a misspelling.

> So to say “farewell” to someones is “have a good journey (in life?)”

On the wiki page for ‘fare’, you have to scroll a little to see the most relevant usage - see Etymology 2 definitions 2, 4, and 5. To get along, to pass through an experience, to happen, to progress.

As a verb, farewell is roughly synonymous with ‘be well’. (This agrees with have a good journey in life, but it doesn’t need to be thought of as travel or an analogy to travel, the meaning and common usage of farewell is already abstract and more general than travel, e.g., “how has your business fared?”)

As a noun, farewell has come to mean a valediction (the opposite of a greeting): wishing someone well when parting. Funny enough, valediction in multiple dictionaries I just checked is defined as a farewell or as the act of bidding farewell.

Que te vaya bien!

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