There's Something About Marry

This is the kind of post you’re more likely to find on my brother Neal’s blog, where he sometimes discusses his favorite ambiguous song lyrics. In a recent Dear Abby column, a letter-writer mentions her ex-husband who “remarried two years ago to a woman I'll call Beth.” This threw me briefly, since the word ‘remarry,’ when used transitively (“he remarried Beth”) instead of intransitively (“he remarried in June”), seems to imply a reunion of two people previously married to each other. Well, that’s how it sounds to me, anyway. Here, the usage of ‘remarry’ appears intransitive, but ‘remarry to’ seems equivalent to the transitive usage; to my ear, the object of the preposition should be one’s ex. But the context, in which the writer herself was the ex, made the intended meaning clear.

Thinking about the transitivity of ‘remarry’ got me thinking about the two different transitive senses of the word ‘marry.’ It can refer to officiating a marriage ceremony (“Reverend Bob married Dave and Alice”), or to taking another as one’s spouse (“Dave married Alice”). The ambiguity comes out in the following passage from the old song “Aba Daba Honeymoon.” This song, despite having been written in 1914, covered the racy topic of a monkey and a chimpanzee who fell in love. According to the song,

Then the big baboon one night in June,
He married them and very soon
They went upon their aba daba honeymoon!

Hearing that at age 8 or so, I always wondered: Did the monkey, chimpanzee, and baboon all get married? Now, that might seem a bizarre thing for an 8-year-old to wonder… but riddle me this: if we’re already talking about interspecies mating, why should polyamory be out of the ballpark?