Cheers

From Critical Cafe, 18 June 2008:

donalmcevoyuk wrote:
[snip]

Perhaps your intellect rises well above this assertion and you can show that the etymology of “cheers” is unrelated to the term “cheering”? (People say “cheers” when toasting; they are in effect “cheering” each other – its entry into the vernacular, as a surrogate for “regards”, is perhaps through this route (I am guessing); in which case etymologically it is related to “cheering”/toasting i.e. it’s a shorthand for “here’s to you”; of course, like “laters”, its overuse denudes it of almost any real meaning.

[snip]

The meaning of a word is what people conventionally use it to mean, not necessarily what its etymology implies. Otherwise we would all use the word “sad” in its ancient sense of “satisfied” or “satiated” (German “satt”).

Whatever the meaning of a sign-off or greeting (or toast) is, it’s something to do with the nature of human social interaction that seems to militate against abrupt beginnings and endings to periods of communication, and is possibly even less related to etymology than other words. If I say “goodbye” I am not invoking god, merely smoothing a separation in a formal relationship. If I say “bye”, “bye-bye” or “tschuess”, I am doing the same in a less formal one.

What DD actually means by “cheers”, of course, is for him only to say.