So here’s a question for you: Given that RSVP stands for répondez s’il vous plait (respond if you please), is it redundant to say Please RSVP, as many invitations do? MRP has been known to edit an invitation that include this phrase to say, instead, please respond.
And what’s your sense of using RSVP as a verb, as in Have you RSVPed to the party yet?
Er, please respond.
‘is it redundant to say Please RSVP…?’
Yes. It’s as redundant as “ATM machine”. “S’il vous plaît” translates literally as “if it you pleases”, i.e., “if it pleases you”, but it effectively means “please”. So “Please RSVP” might as well be “Please respond please.”
In A Dictionary of Modern American Usage Bryan Garner notes that ‘Increasingly, AmE is making the acronym a verb meaning either “to respond” or “to make reservations” . That’s probably why please RSVP is becoming so common.’
This seems a plausible explanation for its prevalence.
Comment by Stan — July 20, 2009 @ 8:57 am |
Oh, Garner’s examples disappeared because they were in HTML brackets. They weren’t essential to my comment but, for the record, what is now inside the single quotation marks is not a direct quote from his book. Next time I’ll use ellipses…
Comment by Stan — July 20, 2009 @ 9:01 am |
I’ll raise you one: I recently received an invitation that included “Please Respond RSVP.”
In this instance, the writer surely thought that “RSVP” was a fancy way of saying “ASAP.” It does raise a question, though – should we count on the reader’s understanding of French? Perhaps more importantly – why not abuse the French language now and then, just for sport? What could be more anglophone than that?
Comment by Neil — July 21, 2009 @ 4:19 pm |
If “please RSVP” is redundant, then so is “Sahara desert”, “La Brae Tar Pits”, “chai tea”, etc etc. In other words, let’s not expect English speakers to know another language in order to speak English.
Also, redundancy isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
Comment by goofy — July 23, 2009 @ 10:54 am |
goofy: Fair points. I don’t expect English speakers to know another language in order to speak English, but it’s quite common for people who don’t know another language to know at least a few basic words or phrases in a few foreign languages, such as for hello, goodbye, please and thank you. RSVP is evidently being anglicised in a variety of ways, but I see nothing wrong with drawing attention to its meaning in French, at least in appropriate contexts.
Comment by Stan — July 23, 2009 @ 11:55 am |