Originally issued February 2006

In the olden days when people wrote to each other on pieces of paper they would often sign off with “sincerely” or “yours truly.”

These formalities above the signature have a name; the “subscription” which makes sense because they are “sub” or below the “script” or writing.

Another name for them is more formal and called the “eschatocol” from the Greek eschatos meaning “last” or “furthest”, and with the same ending as “protocol” since such formal signoffs are the closing protocol of the letter.

I’m sure you’ve seen or heard of sign-offs that go further, into the realm of “I remain your humble servant.”

These days they may be used jokingly but the idea behind them runs along the same lines as the greeting “ciao.”  The word is from Italian and actually means “servant” or “slave.”

English speakers use it as do the Italians not to mean “slave” but to mean “hello” or “goodbye”; something along the lines of “hey.”

Now the word “ciao” is casual, but its meaning “slave,” harkens back to “I am your slave,” the same sense of respect a person signing off with “your humble servant” tried to convey.

It was Ernest Hemmingway who brought the word into English.

He was a man’s man.  A huntin’ fishin’ type of guy.  He tried to fight in the first world war but they rejected him based on his eyesight so he joined an ambulance unit and was sent to fight in Italy.

He’d only been there a week when his legs got nearly shot off and he became a passenger in the ambulance.

Like so many war veterans he came home after the war but had a hard time settling and eventually joined a group of artîsts in Paris.  With a couple of books already under his belt he wrote A Farewell to Arms in 1929; a love story set in Italy in the war.  This was the book that made him as a writer and also the book that brought “ciao” into English.

It’s pretty certain he learned the word during his spell in Italy.

Hemmingway loved hunting as I said, and it was during a big game expedition in Africa that he was killed in 1954 in an aircraft crash.

He was particularly lucky to have survived this death however and was especially pleased that the newspaper obituaries were so glowingly positive about him.

The love story in Farewell to Arms doesn’t end happily, and neither did old Ernest.  In 1961 he shot himself.