Wedding “vendors” — Stop Making My Eyes Itch!

I don’t con­sider myself a wed­ding ven­dor. It makes me think of vend­ing machines on sta­tion plat­forms. Pop 50p in my ear and poke me, and a wed­ding place card will pop out of my mouth… no! I don’t “vend” my prod­ucts — I write, design and sell them. Buy­ing cal­lig­ra­phy isn’t as soul­less as buy­ing a Mars Bar or a can of Coke.

OK, so I’m not set­ting out to offend any­body here. I love wed­ding blogs as much as I love the Eng­lish lan­guage. And therein lies my dilemma…

Wed­ding trends, inspi­ra­tion and ideas are con­stantly being rein­vented in the US and on top wed­ding blogs like Style Me Pretty and Ruf­fled blog. I gen­uinely love the trends from the US… from rus­tic themes to vin­tage, hippy and boho — all wed­ding trends we’ve imported to the UK and wel­comed with open arms.

How­ever. I love the Eng­lish lan­guage. We may have invented the vend­ing machine, but “ven­dor” is a word only used away from our shores. And frankly, I don’t like it. Lis­ten: Vend–or. Front door. In Eng­land our words end in ‘er’. Blender. Seller. We don’t have paint-ors. I’m not a calligraph-or. Are you a wed­ding station-or? Per­haps a photograph-or?

Can’t we just stick to what we know, and to what sounds nice and nor­mal in our Queen’s Eng­lish: wed­ding sup­pli­ers? Wed­ding businesses?

Any­one care to join me in reject­ing this one Amer­i­can­ism from our wed­ding indus­try lan­guage? Or am I being silly? Should I embrace being a wed­ding vend–or, be quiet and launch a range of wed­ding stationary?

C x

Appen­dix A.

My research for this blog post was enter­tain­ing, to say the least. I rec­om­mend you watch this clip show­ing a real wed­ding vend­ing machine — from Corn­wall. For scep­tics here’s the news story to go with it. I also dis­cov­ered pas­sive aggres­sive notes on my trav­els today. Fun!