Marriage

Who is to say what marriage should mean? Not dictionaries, for they record what words do mean, not what they should. Lexicographers are like lepidopterists, catching and describing species, not pig-farmers, breeding and improving them.

Last week Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister asked: ‘Who owns marriage?’ She answered: ‘It is owned by the people,’ and then declared: ‘If a couple love each other and want to commit to a life together, they should have the option of a civil marriage, irrespective of whether they are gay or straight.’ I suppose she meant ‘irrespective of whether they are men or women’.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition of marriage is: ‘The condition of being a husband or wife; the relation between persons married to each other; matrimony.’ It then adds: ‘The term is now sometimes used with reference to long-term relationships between partners of the same sex.’ I’m not quite sure what it means by ‘now’. The entry was revised for the third edition in 2000 and the online version is dated December 2011. In any case, it has gleaned a phrase, from 1975, from the New York Times: ‘The move toward legally-sanctioned marriages between persons of the same sex.’

There are plenty of uses of marriage distant from relations between the sexes. Sometimes the metaphor is explicit. In 1990 Thames Valley Now wrote of ‘Vitello all’ aragosta, a marriage of veal and lobster blessed by a reduced sauce,’ which sounds more disgusting than most things that go on in the marriage bed. Or the metaphor may be implicit, as when faked-up bits of antique furniture are called a marriage.

Take the parallel of the word insect. Scientists insist they have six legs; the OED records a long, oblivious usage referring to spiders, mites and other creepy-crawlies: Sir Thomas Browne wrote of ‘the Scolopendra or hundred-footed insect’.