do you marry your husband?I think not but fear this is taking pedantry to new levels.

[hatwoman]

"She married her husband." Surely this is wrong? But I think I have to let it go, don't I...sigh.

But 'marriage' has two (at least) meanings, one of which is a synonym for 'wedding'. I suspect the synonymic (MADE UP WORD ALERT) usage is actually the original one. Shall I check ... ? I want to check.

No, I haven't ever married him. But perhaps I should have, is what I meant. Not worrying that whilst I did in fact marry him I think perhaps I didn't.

Christ, I'm confused enough even without the brownies.

It's true what they say: grammar is better than sex.

I agree with husband being used as the identifier. If you were talking about something your mother, for example, did before you were born, you would still call her your mother. Although she wasn't your mother at the time.

I think that means I agree that you do, in fact, marry your husband.

Midnight, it might not become clearer with the Brownies, but perhaps we might not care as much......

Druzhok, g'wan then, check it out for us.

Oh gawd. They're not 'proper' synonyms because, as poledra says, marriage can mean wedding, but wedding can't always mean marriage. So you wouldn't say 'my parents have had a long and happy wedding' (usually).

lol Druzhok, it that with your DH or the man who used to be your DH?

True dat, Pol, true dat. Now pass the dooby.

oooh good argument Afternoons
You say "When my mother was a girl"
am going to think and come back with a counter argument - all I can think now is that with the mother one it is glaringly obvious, whereas it could be a bit less obvious with your DH

Marriage is from the French 'mariage' which is used to mean both ceremony and the resulting partnership, which comes from the Latin maritare describing the action and maritus meaning all things nuptial.

You could always invite people to your nuptials instead of your wedding or marriage if you wanted to be really clear.

The state of being wed is wedlock, it's just that the verb nominalises differently.

Ok, I'm afraid to say I was, er, less than right. The Conscise Oxford Dictionary gives a reference of 1297 for marriage as 'the state of marriage between two people' and 1300 for 'the wedding ceremony'.

We need a French speaker, really. Is there a difference in French? Does anyone care except me?

paranoid

This bit from the House that Jack built puzzled me no end.....

This is the priest all shaven and shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn etc etc

If you have already done it, you marry your husband.

If you haven't done it yet you say 'when I marry my fiance' (in the future) or even 'when I marry my boyfriend' (slightly further in the future).

Look at ViveleFrak, anticipating my every need. What a woman.

right
if your mother wasn't your mother you wouldn't exist to commit the grammatical faux-pas
not so with your husband
...best i can come up with so far, but it warrants further investigation

UQD how are those windows coming on?

It's an endless, endless discussion I had with DH (native French speaker) about why we have separate words for marriage and wedding etc.

I reckon it's about the difference between identity and identification. You are identifying the person you married, but you need to use a word or phrase that conveys the sense of who that person is. The person stays the same, but the sense changes, so the day before your wedding you would say that you are going to marry your fiancé, but afterwards you'd say that you married your husband, because that's the word that most easily identifies him now. So it would be odd, now, to say that you married your fiancé, unless you are speaking in the historical context of the time before you were married.

IMHO.

I had assumed that marriage was the Latinate term and wedding the Germanic, so basically you select your social aspirations and go ...

Bravo SPB! Very impressive. I'm now far too confused to provide a counter arguement without marrying my mother or.........something.

Absolutely Dru.

It's just that he'd learnt/made the association in English:

wedding = ceremony
marriage = partnership

Hence the getting confused when I used the 2 terms interchangably. He also confessed that he had no idea until I explained why having babies in wedlock was so important - he'd assumed it was like having a baby in a hospital. I shouldn't have laughed but he was sweetly clueless (extremely intelligent and almost perfectly bilingual but baffled by wedlock).

'Wedlock' is one of those peculiar old-fashioned words. Another one that comes to mind for me is 'midriff' - I was invigilating a medical exam once, and had to explain midriff to a number of very-fluent-but-not-their-first-language English speakers.

I had to explain midriff to a student the other day as well. In the context of exposed midriffs....

Something you would think, given their particular age, they would have been more than familiar with.

Did you know that 'hrif' is old English for 'belly'?