Live-blogging your own wedding ceremony or the birth of your child? Even I'd think twice about that:
Some academics say the live posts are the latest twist in the decades-old conflict between living in the moment and memorializing it from behind a camera lens, only worse....Expecting about half a dozen bloggers at their wedding, Joey de Villa, 39, and Wendy Koslow, 32, posted "A Note To Other Bloggers" on their wedding Web site about two weeks before their September 2005 nuptials in Cambridge, Mass. The note asked guests not to bring their laptops to the event and to only blog about the wedding after the fact...Although the guests complied, the first attendee blog post was up by 11:16 that night, shortly after the reception ended. The culprit: Rev. A. K. M. Adam, a 49-year-old Episcopal priest from Evanston, Ill., who preached at the ceremony.
Why do people say "attendee" when logically it should be "attender"?
Posted by: dearieme | Saturday, March 03, 2007 at 10:20 PM
I suppose if that's what people want to do. Each to his or her own. Would they plan a daughter's wedding under water, for example?
Posted by: jameshigham | Sunday, March 04, 2007 at 10:31 AM
A response to the first posted comment: Attendee, because it follows grammatical style, as in employee, payee, honoree... the person who is the receiver (or the receivee... tee hee).
As for the second comment: huh?
I think the trend, such as it is, is disturbing--more or less validating an experience or event through an exercise (writing about it) rather than an awareness and presence in the REAL "real" time. Writing about it becomes more important than the event itself. Akin to the photos being more important than the vacation. It all seems so misplaced.
My brother once bought an expensive camera before he set out on a cross-country trip (USA). He ended up never taking a single photo because, he said, he didn't want to miss anything. He didn't want his photos to be the sum total of his experience, and to only remember what was printed on a 4 X 6 piece of paper.
I suppose this is the same reason I sometimes hesitate to write essays about personal experiences, because then the essay becomes the experience, and all else gets "edited" out.
Posted by: Patti | Sunday, March 04, 2007 at 05:43 PM
Bollocks, Patti. The employee is the person who is employed, the employer the one who does the employing. So an attendee would be one who was attended, whatever that might mean. One who attends is an attender, one who drives a driver, one who bakes a baker, etc.
Posted by: dearieme | Sunday, March 04, 2007 at 08:13 PM
Both, however, sound like ideal opportunities for live Vlogging, with streaming videos.
I've often wanted to get my car fitted out with a 360° panoramic camera on the roof, to be operated from within the vehicle. Mostly, it would just be turned on at the start of a trip, then off at the end. It might even prove useful forensically!
Posted by: John | Monday, March 05, 2007 at 06:33 AM
At the danger of this thread turning into the letters page of the Daily Telegraph, circa the middle of last week, what's wrong with the word "attendant" - or for that matter - "guest".
I fear our American friends are trying to develop the use of the genitive into the English language as in "attendee blog" = "blog belonging to an attendant".
Romans go home, is all I can say to that.
Posted by: Danvers Baillieu | Monday, March 05, 2007 at 06:08 PM
But he wasn't a guest. He officiated. Or, in American, he was the officiatee.
Posted by: dearieme | Monday, March 05, 2007 at 07:33 PM