The Pun Also Rises

"Here Comes The Gride"

    I have recently returned from a wedding, where I watched two more of my friends get married. I say "two more" instead of just "two" because I've attended a lot of weddings in the past few years. Heck, I've attended two weddings in the past two weeks, and another friend of mine is getting married two weeks from now. Either love is in the air, or something is in the water. Maybe both.

    Regardless, the wedding I saw this weekend was a very nice event for me. And I think this is partially due to the fact that I had just the right level of connection to the bride and groom. I knew and liked them both, unlike a wedding I attended two years ago where I had never even met the groom. I think if you only know half of the people getting married, the wedding is only half as interesting. (And therefore, according to Einstein's theory of relativity, feels twice as long.)

    Conversely, attending the wedding of someone you know too well is also dangerous. You could be asked to be a groomsman or bridesmaid, in which case you'll be expected to do things aside from just showing up. I couldn't tell you exactly what things, because I have not been a groomsman this year. Then again, I was a groomsman at the wedding of a friend a few years back, and I still couldn't tell you what I was supposed to do. There may have been some planning or helping with setup that was supposed to occur, but from what I recall, my contribution mainly involved wearing a tuxedo.

    Bridesmaids, in addition to having much more elaborate clothes, generally do more of the logistical planning. This is because for women, a wedding is a magical gathering and celebration that puts the bride's family and love on display for the world to see, and hence must be dressed up in perfect color-coordinated bows and ribbons and timed liked a precision swiss watch, which should also be color-coordinated to match the bridesmaid dresses.

    For men, a wedding is an event where the groom shows up with a fiancee, says he loves her, and leaves with a wife.

    This is not to say, however, that men don't face any challenges in planning. For example, at the wedding I was at two weeks ago, the bride and groom had fed each other a bite of cake, and suddenly realized they had no plates to put the rest of the cake on and were holding a huge piece of cake. So the groom took decisive action, and put the remainder of the slice right back into the rest of the cake. When I asked him how he got this bold idea, he said, "She told me to do it."

    At the wedding I just came back from, the bride and groom were supposed to kindle a unity candle to symbolize their union, each taking a smaller candle to co-light a big one. But the big candle didn't light. The groom valiantly kept trying to light the candle, until the bride finally pushed both small candles to the middle of the table, drawing applause from the crowd. (And since she had also attended the wedding mentioned previously, she was sure to have little plates on hand for the cutting of the cake.)

    In fact, I almost wonder if we haven't confused the words for bride and groom. Could it have originally been the gride and broom? Gride, as I just learned by looking it up in a dictionary, means to cut with a grating sound, or pierce harshly. This would make perfect sense with the woman's role as planner. The gride must be harsh and make piercing sounds at her husband-to-be so all of the logistics work out correctly. The broom, meanwhile, needs do nothing more than sweep the woman off of her feet.

    So next time you attend a wedding and someone refers to the bride and groom, feel free to correct them and explain that the correct terms might well be gride and broom. That's my current theory -- although I'm not married to it.

____________________

    Seth Brown is a local humor writer who is not good at planning things. He appears frequently in the Washington Post's Style Invitational, infrequently in various other publications, and once in book form -- in his first book, "Think You're the Only One?" published by Barnes & Noble. His Web site is www.risingpun.com

All work on this page is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first.