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分享一个知识点： Reader question: In this sentence – they polished the furniture to a fare-thee-well – could you explain “fare-thee-well”? My comments: First of all, “to a fare-thee-well” is the real phrase in question here, and it is a fixed phrase. But first, fare-thee-well. This is just one way of saying goodbye, especially if you're leaving someone for a long time and you want to say something that sounds more learned than “Bye-bye”. It means “May you (thee being an old form of you or thou) fare well.” If you fare well, of course you do well, cope well and you get on well. The great Irish singer Mary Black sings: Fare thee well, my own true love. Farewell for a while. I'm going away, but I'll return, if I go 10,000 miles... Earnest Hemingway, of course titled his 1929 semiautobiographical novel A Farewell to Arms. “To a fare-thee-well”, however, has nothing to do with goodbye or good riddance. It means instead “to the highest degree”. If you do something to a fare-thee-well, you do it to perfection. In the example from above, wherein people are said to polish their furniture to a fare-thee-well, it means they polish the woodwork to the point of a shiny spotless condition. I have no idea how an archaic and ancient-sounding way of saying goodbye comes to this usage but the phrase “to a fare-thee-well” is said to have been in circulation since the 18th Century, according to my limited research at any rate, and Oxford English Dictionary calls it an American English colloquialism. | 
