with their families
With their familiesOr something like that. Everything after the first line is quite variable and I take particular issue with that line alone - I prefer that they request my presence at their wedding rather than invite me to celebrate their wedding, for instance, but don't really care enough to complain here.
$BOY and $GIRL
request the honour of your presence
at their marriage
on the tenth of Septober.
Here are my objections:
- It sounds terribly clunky. One might argue formal language sounds clunky, but the traditional language (so and so requests the honour of your presence at the marriage of her daughter blah blah blah to Mr such and such at this location at this time) is really rather simple. "With their families" sounds like crap.
- It doesn't make any sense. An event has a host and the host invites people to the event. The invitations are issued by the host. Who's the host? Is it $BOY and $GIRL? Their "families"? The invitation's wording suggests it is the "families" and $BOY and $GIRL. You can't have 10 or 20 hosts. Enough of the charades: $BOY and $GIRL are the hosts and they are inviting me. This isn't some magic crap, this is a party with a host. Compose your invitation accordingly.
- A further discussion of why this is nonsensical by discussing where this monstrosity came from. In days of yore, weddings were hosted by the mother of the bride and invitations were issued accordingly. Situations are more complicated these days, since most people getting married these days are not being married out of their mother's care, as it were. Modifications were made to include both parents (hey, there are two...). Then, of course, as people were hosting their own weddings, essentially, and the whole idea of having a wedding became divorced from having one's mother host the wedding (quite rightly), people thought to put both sides on the invitation, since it's just formal wording rather than anything meaningful and there are two sides, after all, and both might be tossing cash at this shindig. Of course, family dynamics being what they are, such a listing of parents can be very "complicated". Accordingly, "with their families", which kind of blunts the whole idea of acknowledging both sides of the equation, which was kind of silly in the first place, but understandable. This is just stupid. A wedding is just a big party. Host invites people to party. Period. Very easy. No need to turn the invitation into an Academy Award acceptance speech, nor to make it a very weird acceptance speech by eliding everybody else out of it.
And, response cards. I ignore them and write my own reply unless they indicate a meal selection, in which case I hate them but acquiesce.
OTHER THINGS TO FUEL THE HATE: Crossfit / USA Weightlifting Open. I threw up a little. I guess I won't even join the USAW and compete in weightlifting. Now, I know some people had been making noises about how USAW should make some overtures to @Fit because @Fit has gotten a lot of people interested in the classical lifts, and I probably agree with them, but this is not the way to do it. The way to do it would probably be to throw instruction at them, maybe help them hold non-sanctioned meets to pique their interest in competing, crap like that. This is just nonsense. I sincerely hope for some sort of destruction to result. The USAW is a joke: North Korea does better at the Olympics than we do.
SOMETHING THAT DOES NOT FUEL HATE: My package arrived. Well, that was unexpected. I now have more shorts.
MORE HATRED: I just thought about the USAW again. AAARRRGH.
OTHER HATRED: why doesn't google calendar have a view that's like five weeks and I can scroll up and down a week at a time? They have a month view, but scrolling moves it month-by-month. I HATE THIS. Even Lotus Notes, which is a worse e-mail/calendar/everything solution than Emacs, has this function.
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