10 April 2016

ciao

[chah-aw; English chou]

interjection, Italian.

1. (used as a word of greeting or parting): hello; goodbye; so long; see you later.

Word Origin and History for ciao

parting salutation, 1929, dialectal variant of Italian schiavo “(your obedient) servant,” literally “slave,” from Medieval Latin sclavus “slave”

Dictionary.com

Examples from the Web for ciao

Historical Examples

I believe the word is derived from “schiavo,” a slave, which became corrupted into “schiao,” and “ ciao.”
Selections from Previous Works
Samuel Butler

Nevertheless, ‘we have never sunk to such a disgraceful act’ of selling fellow Christians, he [Pope Hadrain I] wrote, ‘and God forbid that we should’. So widespread was slavery in the Mediterranean and Arabic world that even today regular greetings reference human trafficking. All over Italy, when they meet, people say to each other, ‘schiavo’, from a Venetian dialect. ‘Ciao’, as it is more commonly spelt, does not mean ‘hello’; it means ‘I am your slave’.
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Peter Frankopan

Today’s quote

Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.

– Pancho Villa

On this day

10 April 1815 – Indonesia’s Mount Tambora volcano begins a three month long eruption that lasted until 15 July 1815. It killed 71,000 people and affected the world’s climate for the next two years.

10 April 1912 – the ill-fated Titanic departs the port in Southampton, England bound for New York. On 14 April 1912, she hit an ice-berg and sank, killing more than 1,500 people.

10 April 1919 – death of Emiliano Zapata Salazar, Mexican revolutionary.

10 April 1979 – birth of Rachel Corrie, American peace activist. She was killed on 16 May 2003 when run over by an Israeli bulldozer that she was trying to stop from demolishing a Palestinian house in Gaza. Rachel was committed from an early age to human rights and caring for the poor as shown in this speech she gave in the fifth grade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g__QAJ5gtQk