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Reader question:

In this sentence – they polished the furniture to a fare-thee-well – could you explain “fare-thee-well”?

My comments:

First of all, “to a fare-thee-well” is the real phrase in question here, and it is a fixed phrase.

But first, fare-thee-well.

This is just one way of saying goodbye, especially if you're leaving someone for a long time and you want to say something that sounds more learned than “Bye-bye”. It means “May you (thee being an old form of you or thou) fare well.”

If you fare well, of course you do well, cope well and you get on well.

The great Irish singer Mary Black sings:

Fare thee well, my own true love. Farewell for a while. I'm going away, but I'll return, if I go 10,000 miles...

Earnest Hemingway, of course titled his 1929 semiautobiographical novel A Farewell to Arms.

“To a fare-thee-well”, however, has nothing to do with goodbye or good riddance. It means instead “to the highest degree”. If you do something to a fare-thee-well, you do it to perfection. In the example from above, wherein people are said to polish their furniture to a fare-thee-well, it means they polish the woodwork to the point of a shiny spotless condition.

I have no idea how an archaic and ancient-sounding way of saying goodbye comes to this usage but the phrase “to a fare-thee-well” is said to have been in circulation since the 18th Century, according to my limited research at any rate, and Oxford English Dictionary calls it an American English colloquialism.

Anyways, this phrase is widely used today in America, perhaps precisely due to the archaic and ancient-sounding effect it brings. Here are a few recent media examples:

1. I've finally figured out the Republicans' philosophy: If President Barack Obama is in favor of something, it has to be wrong, even if they once believed in it.

Save the economy from collapse by propping up the banks, which former President George W. Bush did to a fare thee well? That's now socialism. Talk to school children about turning off video games and doing their homework? That's “creepy” and Orwellian, indoctrinating the young as if they are guinea pigs.

- Fat Panels Would Be Scarier Than Death Panels: Margaret Carlson, Bloomberg.com, September 17, 2009.

2. Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, 88, who was ignored by President Bush and relegated to the rear of the White House briefing room during his administration, lashed out at the Obama administration for what she called “a pattern of controlling the press.” During a briefing on Wednesday with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Thomas said that even “Nixon didn't try to do that. ... What the hell do they think we are, puppets?” She objected to Obama's decision to invite a writer from the Huffington Post to ask him a question sent in from a citizen in Iran. She interrupted when Gibbs promised CBS News correspondent Chip Reid that he would “interrupt” the tradition of allowing the Associated Press to ask the first question and let Reid ask him on Thursday about the questions raised by the audience at Wednesday's town hall meeting in Annandale, VA. Thomas charged that Gibbs was openly attempting to manage the news. “I'm not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to a fare-thee-well – for the town halls, for the press conferences,” she said. “It's blatant. ... They ought to be hanging their heads in shame.”

- Helen Thomas Accuses Obama of Trying to Manage the Press, ContactMusic.com, July 2, 2009.

3. Here is a media ecology that will not—cannot—explain that it is the slow, steady work of structure-building and structure-understanding that produces presidential nominations and election victories. Which commentator, around the time the political media were inspiring publishing companies to cancel biographies of that also-ran Republican candidate John McCain, was making the responsibly mature point that Republican nominations always tend to go to the most establishment figure? That the winner is generally the one who finished second in the previous nomination fight? In a responsible, mature political commentary, such observations would be routine. But our media ecology is irresponsible and immature, to a fare-thee-well.

-‘Our media will not—cannot— explain the slow, steady work that produces election victories', Boston Review, September/October 2009.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: [email protected], or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

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