Hasta la vista is Spanish for ‘see you later’. Word for word it is ‘until the sight’, a way of saying ‘until we see each other again’. The phrase is Spanish rather than English in origin, and it was already appearing in English writing in 1835, more than a century and a half before Arnold Schwarzenegger made a film catchphrase of it.
The origin of ‘Hasta la vista’ - the short version
Hasta la vista, just meaning ‘bye’ or ‘see you later’ in Spanish, was brought to the public’s attention after it became a catchphrase in the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
The phrase is a great deal older than the film. It was being printed in English books and magazines from the 1830s onwards, as a piece of Spanish colour in writing about Spain and, later, the American west.
The origin of ‘Hasta la vista’ - the full story
Although many Spanish speakers would use ‘hasta luego’ to say ‘see you later’, hasta la vista is also a way of saying goodbye.
The words themselves are ordinary Spanish. The Cambridge Dictionary’s Spanish-English entry translates hasta as ‘till, until’ and the noun vista as ‘sight’, so hasta la vista is literally ‘until the sight’: until we see each other again. The Online Etymology Dictionary reads it the same way, as Spanish for ‘until the meeting (again)’, a salutation in parting.
English writers were borrowing it long before either the song or the film. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used it in Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea, published in New York by Harper in 1835. In a Madrid chapter he takes his leave of a Spanish acquaintance:
Therefore, Don Diego, hasta la vista!
It stayed foreign enough to need explaining for a long time after that. In Margaret Cameron’s story ‘Patricia, Angel-at-Large’, printed in Harper’s Magazine in June 1915, a man uses the phrase and the woman he is speaking to has to ask what it means:
“It’s the Spanish equivalent of ‘See you later,’” he explained, smiling. “Until we meet again.”
It kept turning up in American magazine fiction about the west. Gilbert Patten’s story ‘The Desert Trap’, in Top-Notch Magazine for 1 December 1927, closes a parting exchange with both Spanish farewells one after the other, ‘hasta la vista’ from one man and ‘hasta luego’ from the other.
This phrase has been in everyday use in Spanish-speaking countries for some time. It was used in the popular song Looking for a New Love, which was taken from Jody Watley’s first album and released as a single in 1987:
My love was true
Still you threw it all away
But now you’re like the rest
Unworthy of my best
Hasta la vista, baby
‘Hasta la vista, baby’ came to the wider attention of the English-speaking world via the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, written by James Cameron and William Wisher Jr.
The phrase features in an exchange between the film’s characters John Connor (Edward Furlong) and ‘The Terminator’ (Arnold Schwarzenegger):
John Connor: No, no, no, no. You gotta listen to the way people talk. You don’t say “affirmative,” or some s*** like that. You say “no problemo.” And if someone comes on to you with an attitude you say “eat me.” And if you want to shine them on it’s “hasta la vista, baby.”
The Terminator: Hasta la vista, baby.
John Connor: Yeah but later, dickwad. And if someone gets upset you say, “chill out”! Or you can do combinations.
The Terminator: Chill out, dickwad.
John Connor: Great! See, you’re getting it!
The Terminator: No problemo.
‘Hasta la vista’ is sometimes misspelled as ‘asta la vista’.
The catchphrase escaped the film long ago, in the way that ‘make my day’ escaped its own, and in English it now does the work of a light parting word such as ‘toodle-oo’ rather than a formal goodbye.