weddings and grammar musings

[cellio]

Thaddeus and Dana's wedding is in two weeks, and I still don't have any good ideas about what to get them. He's a professional-grade chef, so I wouldn't presume to guess about kitchen toys. She's been married once before, so she probably already has a bunch of the stereotypical stuff. They've been living together for 5 years already, so I'm betting they have all the usual household stuff. They aren't registered anywhere.

I know Thaddeus from years in the SCA, though they're fairly inactive now. (I've met Dana but don't really know her.) Still, maybe the thing to do is to arrange for two sets of custom ceramic feast gear (I know an excellent artist who did a custom seder plate for me a few years back) and let them pick what they want. So if they want something SCA-suitable then fine, and if not they can get something mundane. I prefer to give people actual gifts rather than vouchers, but I also prefer that people actually like and be able to use what I get them. :-)

What is the proper way to punctuate [X and Y]'s wedding, anyway? "X and Y's" strikes me as fundamentally incorrect ("wedding" should bind equally to X and Y), but "X's and Y's" looks a bit funny too, probably because it subtly implies two nouns rather than one.

Comments

Re: posessive binding

[cellio]

Yup. #2 is correct but "weird", and in normal discourse the parentheses would throw people. After all, the normal rule is that when you encounter an open-paren, you're about to head into a tangential or clarifying comment, not a core part of the sentence. It is supposed to be the case that you can remove parenthetical expressions and still have a valid sentence. So while (X and Y)'s wedding is logically and mathematically correct, you can make the argument that it is ungrammatical.

"The wedding of X and Y" is, as you say, cumbersome.

In formal writing I will work to avoid issues such as this. I found it awkward to do when writing a journal entry. I suppose I should have said something like "X and Y are getting married in 2 weeks, and...". That would have done the trick.

Oh well.