Good riddance!
I'm glad he's gone!
TRANSLATION
good riddance! = Ein Glück, dass wir ihn/sie los sind!
STATISTICS
IN THE PRESS
"Thanks, goodbye and 'GOOD RIDDANCE’ — EU’s parting words to UK"
The Financial Times (headline)
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Croatian envoy’s Brexit message to British counterpart lost in translation.
The misspoken farewell, spoken by the Croatian ambassador to her UK counterpart Tim Barrow last week, perhaps sums up 47 years of the Britons being lost in translation in Brussels.
Irena Andrassy, the Croatian ambassador, was chairing the UK’s final meeting of EU envoys as a member state because her country holds the six-month EU presidency. She assumed “good riddance” was akin to “good luck”, said diplomats present in the room.
Did you
know?
good riddance
idiom
- said when you are pleased that a bad or unwanted thing or person, or something of poor quality, has gone
Cambridge Dictionaries
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The first thing to know about the expression "good riddance" is that it is by nature a cynical phrase. By expressing relief or delight that you have gotten rid of (more about the word "rid" a little later) something or someone, the implication is that the person or thing that has been eliminated is bad, unpleasant or simply unwanted.
The noun riddance - a deliverance from or removal of something unwanted or undesirable - is rarely used by itself and instead is mostly utilized in the imperative expression "good riddance." This was not always the case however. In the 16th and 17th centuries, riddance was a general purpose noun and meant deliverance from or getting rid of something. Shakespeare appears to be one of the first users of "good riddance," which he used in Troilus and Cressida.
In British English, this expression is often extended to "good riddance to bad rubbish" as a way to emphasise the negative quality of the thing or person being referred to.
Riddance stems from the verb "rid," meaning to free or deliver from something undesirable (I finally rid myself of our visitors!) It is frequently combined with "get" in the passive auxiliary form "get rid of" (I can't wait to get rid of my old car!). Rid is believed to stem from a Scandinavian source (perhaps the Old Norse ryðja) that meant to clear (such as a space, a piece of land) or set free.
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Practice OWAD in a conversation
"Their neighbours with the barking dog have moved to another town. GOOD RIDDANCE! they said."