Tuesday 29 March 2011

Miss Manners would not approve





I have finally finished printing the wedding invitations.  And it feels AWESOME (except for the part where I printed 60 info cards with a grammatical error on them.  oops. But I am not reprinting! Unless my mother notices it (before reading this Mom or it doesn't count.)) .  But before I tell you about them, and show you pretty pictures of them, you get to hear about my charming experience trying to address the envelopes.

I addressed the save the dates in this fashion:

Mr and Mrs. John & Jane SoandSo

for two reasons.  

1. I am not comfortable with Mrs. John SoandSo.  I am not and will not ever be the female appendage of my male counterpart, and I will always choose to use both people's first names.  They can call themselves Mrs. John SoandSo all they want, and I won't judge anyone, but I am not going to thrust it on anyone.  My mom still gets birthday cards from my grandmother addressed to Mrs. DadsName, and my mom  has only been married to him for 30 years now.  I am really not looking forward to trying to explain this to people, and am touchy on the subject.

2. almost everything is do is wordy and verbose and unnecessary, so why would I miss the opportunity to use both a tiny and between names and a fancy ampersand?  I only get to send out so much correspondence in my life people, and I want to use as many characters as possible!



So for the full-on invitation, I did some checking on the infallible internets.  And apparently, what I was doing on the save the dates is "wrong" for 2 reasons:
1.  HEAVEN FORBID we separate the man's first name from his last name.  If we did that, he might forget his last name or something!  Which is another reason you need to take his name when you get married, because he needs more reminders. (Ugh I am sorry, I am snarky today.  My stance on this subject is not, you are a fool if you change your name it, is YOU do whatever YOU want, because you want it and not because someone else says you have to. )

2.  Apparently using "and" and "and" is redundant.  Really?  I didn't need you to tell me that - I have eyes, and I can see they are in fact the same word.


So I decided to turn to the ultimate wedding authority: the Kn*t.  Hah.  And what do you know?  They say I can use Mr and Mrs. John & Jane SoandSo if I want! (They do acknowledge it is a bit verbose.  Deal with it, I am verbose.)  And people, if the Kn*t has jumped on a bandwagon and off some stuffy high horse, I think it should be fine.


Now if only I could get over the grammatical mistake....


4 comments:

  1. This is what we did. No one cared. And it looked lovely with all the unnecessary characters. =)

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  2. we skipped the titles and just addressed them to John & Jane So and So! or John So and Jane Soso or whatever. have you seen the APW advice on addressing invites? it's pretty good/comprehensive. I was going to go find it for you but the internets are giving me a hard time right now...

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  3. they're beautiful and i love the ampersand lady!

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  4. So I didn't find it before you pointed out there was one. I've now looked and found it. My father will find it so we should maybe place bets on whether he mentions it or not (I bet he doesn't). They look very nice. I've removed all the postcards on the fridge and put them up there. I'll let you arrange them artistically.

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