An Invitation - Not
Wednesday, May 07, 2014
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| Invitation to go to Madrid on May 7. |
Sometimes one language over another might
reveal the meaning behind a word. Most of us would never consider that the verb
to invite which comes from Latin means with or in life.
In is much more obvious in Spanish where
the word has two versions. One is invitar and the other envidar. The latter is
sometimes used in an old Spanish card game and it means to invite to play.
Envidar is much closer in hinting that to
invite means I have something to share with you. This word, then is a
very intimate. An invitation (not that odd and more mechanical sounding invite)
is something personal and very special.
I once had a very beautiful woman call me
up in the middle of the night for an invitsation that as pleasant as it was I had
to refuse. This woman, of Latin origin, wanted me to take a course (she was
going to pay) at a local encounter group called Lifespring. This encounter
group was going to help me remove all my guilt so I could abandon my wife and
two daughters and move to Hawaii
with this wonderful woman.
When I first arrived in Vancouver in 1975 Rosemary and were invited
to something called “after dinner drinks”. Neither Rosemary (born in New Dublin,
Ontario) or I knew what exactly this meant. I thought it was odd. For many
years when people from abroad asked me about Vancouver I invariably said, “Vancouverites
are as cold as their tap water.”
At 71, in my de facto retirement I can
state that phone calls are at a minimum as are invites to (Thank God!) to stag
parties, Saturday weddings (that ruin your weekend), birthday parties and
parties in general. I do feel a tad isolated. But then many of my generation
are dead or suffering from life threatening diseases or going through rapid
mental deterioration.
That most personal invitation, one to visit
someone began to fall apart with the advent of web pages. The Vancouver Sanitation
Department invited you to “come and visit us at VancSanDep.Ca”. Fantastic I was
being invited to look at all I did not want to know about garbage.
Browse is another word that has lost its strength.
Whenever I browsed at Duthies the people who worked there knew me and they would
approach to suggest. This was pleasant. Browsing at Chapters is not quite the same.
For personal attention, re cameras I go to Leo’s Cameras as opposed to Future Shop
where attention is impersonal.
All that brings me to a pet peeve I have
harboured for some time. This is the facebook invite.
If you invite someone to your birthday
party you might be decent enough to state you don’t want a present. If you
invite someone for dinner you might tell them not to bring anything. You just
want the pleasure of the company.
But these facebook invitations to events in
which you are given three choices, to go, not go or be in doubt about going,
involve you, the invitee to pay so you can go to the event. I get invitations
in facebook by people I don’t really know to go to rock concerts late at night
(who goes to those anymore?) or to art openings.
It is easy for me to invite my friend John
Lekich for dinner. I can call him up. I can email him or (and I don’t quite
know why I would do this) direct message him in facebook. This would signal to
Lekich that I am not sending a blanket invitation to all the people I know or
know a little in facebook, even those who are geographically somewhere else. Standard
facebook reply to one of these blanket invitations is, “I would love to attend
but I will be out of town attending my mother-in-law’s funeral.”
By matter of principle I ignore all
facebook blanket invitations. But I can be directly messaged. That is a tad
more personal.
