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tie the knot comes from the grecian tradition of tying a girdle around the bride for the groom to undo after the wedding
Isn't there also that tradition where the bride and groom hold hands and the vicar/priest/whatever ties a wide (purple) ribbon around their joined hands and forearms?
Leads up to: "Those whom God has joined, let no man tear asunder"
I've definitely seen this happen, but can't remember where.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Mein Fischling, I haven't heard of the ribbon tradition.
Meanwhile, we here in the US of A have an expression: "jumping the broom." It's a slave tradition, but I don't know its derivation.
Here's hoping someone can elucidate one or both of the above.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
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re:Isn't there also that tradition where the bride and groom hold hands and the vicar/priest/whatever ties a wide (purple) ribbon around their joined hands and forearms?
its not a ribbon, but a strip of cloth, (don't know the color) and its part of a catholic wedding mass- and maybe others.
Jumping over the broom, i have heard comes for Ashanti customs. most slaves, where held not to be "real" people, so even if instructed in christian believes, they were exempted from (christian and or legal) marriage.
but since people everywhere mark marriage, they devised their own customs.
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"jumping the broom"
Very seasonal.
Maybe it's hard to get them started after they've been sitting in a damp shed most of the year?
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No thread concerning marriage terms can be complete without the following Groucho Marx quote:
"Why any man would marry a woman is a mystery. Why any man would marry two women is a bigamystery."
How perfect is that?!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Actually is an old misprint, and was originally a reference to over-eager brides jumping the groom.
TEd
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are you sure that right, TEd? RE: Actually is an old misprint, and was originally a reference to over-eager brides jumping the groom.i thought we went down that path last month, when we discussed riding broom sticks.. http://wordsmith.org/board/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=announcements&Number=82694&and i thought one of the ideas behind marriage was making the need for a broom obsolete?but now we are acting like the customs of wedding nights, when guest would bang pots and pans, and make other noise to distract the bride and groom...and being all to bawdy.. surely we can do better with wedding words..
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part of a catholic wedding mass
Maybe regional, Helen? Catholic all my life and been to many a wedding, but have never seen this done as part of the Mass. Or any other time, come to think about it.
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Pooh-Bah
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I'm too idle to LIU at the moment, but most certainly the cutom of "jumping over the broomstick" is ancient british. Possibly an adaptation of druidic ceremonies? But definitely used by the lower classes and especially by sectors of the population who were not accepted within society - outlaws, gypsies and itinerant workers. It was a way of declaring to the rest of your social group that the two of you were "an item" and that it was unacceptable for other members of the group to pay any sort of addresses to either of the participants unless and until they had declared the arrangement to be over. Jumping the broomstick continued right into the C20 in some parts of Britain (and may still happen, for all I know!)
There were also a variety of "divorce" ceremonies, including that of auctioning your wife! This was often a pre-arranged thing, with only one bidder, although not always so. Usually (but not always) the wife was able to exercise some degree veto on whom she should end up with.
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re:There were also a variety of "divorce" ceremonies, including that of auctioning your wife!
as in T Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge?
(and WW, i know you love Hardy, but i can't stand anything he wrote. my daughter shares your believes, and thinks Tess and Jude to be wonderful books.)
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