God Be With You

I just read about this neat trivial detail of greetings and other "phatic" elements (via) of conversation:

English “Good-bye” is a distortion of “God bye” of the early nineteenth century, and “God bye” come out of “God be with you” of the Middle Ages. So “Good-bye” is a religion-loaded farewell. In the late 1960s, young Californians, who were too hip to believe in God and too now-oriented to even consider tomorrow, came up with the vapid “Have a nice day.” Soon it became endemic and popular all over the U.S. But, to Chinese, this farewell may sound strange and confusing.