I remember the first time someone said, “Have a good one” to me. It was 1986, and I worked in the public relations department at Condell Memorial Hospital in Libertyville. His name was Tom; he was a printing broker; and I had just given him an order.
“Have a good one,” he said as he left my office in a happy mood. I wanted to call after him, “Have a good what?” But I didn’t. I suspected he wouldn’t know what I meant.
Wordsmiths are like that. They pick nits with colloquialisms for the fun of it. They parse sentences as they are being spoken. They look for pronouns that don’t have antecedents. And, I confess, I am one of them.
I’m always dissecting language when it confronts me. I hate the wrong pronoun, the incorrect verb, the vague description. Which is why “Have a good one” grates.
Innately I understand the saying is a variation of “Have a nice day” or “Have a good day.” That’s probably why I didn’t reprimand the errant printer years ago. At the same time, you could extrapolate many interpretations from “Have a good one.” Many of them have moral implications too.
Have a good lunch. A good martini. A good day. A good marriage. A good life. In these cases, good is an adjective that modifies a noun. In “Have a good one,” however, it is an adjective called into service to modify a pronoun. But pronouns have to refer to nouns that exist somewhere above them in the dialogue. And “Have a good one” doesn’t do that; it appears from nowhere and is used as a closing statement.
I suspect I’ve lost most readers, so suffice to say that “Have a good one” rings with ambiguity and lack of thought. If the person who said it were truly listening to the person on the other end of the conversation, he or she could say something much more relevant. Like, “Have a good weekend at your family reunion.” Or “Have a good evening at the opera.”
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