salutory greetings in an email- chaitos??

Question

My stepdaughter used the word ''chaitos'' in her email to me. My Merriam-Webster dictionary does not show this exact word either.

She used it to sign off-

''Chaitos, Maria''

Answer 1

What Heidita said. I just wish to expand a bit: The original, as Heidita stated, is "Ciao", which Italians use both for "Hi",and "Bye". In many Spanish speaking countries, we adopted our version "Chao", just to mean "Bye" - never "Hello".

People being people, and always creative, come up with all kinds of variations of their own, which is quite ok in terms of informal language use. The fact is, regular people use "grammatically incorrect" language all the time, be it knowingly or not, for fun and flexibility. This happens in all languages. English, in particular, is quite lax in this regard, and you get to see very peculiar things in writing even in public mass media, which one thinks ought to do better.

Things like "scratch n' sniff"; "howdy ya'll", and "chix bits", for example. I have seen plenty of street signs with "Deer Xing" or "Train Xing", which took me a long time to figure out.

So, if you can say "howdy"; "luv n' xos", "hugsies",a nd other silly stuff like that (and you know what it all means), doesn't it follow that Spanish speakers will say things like "Chaitos", "abrazooootess!!", y "kariñitos", just for fun?

Answer 2

Hi jon, welcome to the forum

This is modern stuff: chao is the original form, nor really Spanish but Italian, used though to say bye.

Chaitios: good byes