The best man was forty seconds into his toast at the Mesquite Bend Event Barn on Saturday when he reached the phrase “for all intensive purposes” — and a voice from table nine, calm and clear as a bell over water, said: “Intents. And purposes.”
The voice belonged to Edmund Grieve, 74, a retired English teacher and the groom's great-uncle, who told the Ledger he had “no regrets, only standards.”
Accounts of what followed vary. The best man, to his credit, attempted to continue. He reached “irregardless” eleven seconds later. Witnesses describe the sound Grieve made as “not a word, exactly,” but “a kind of air raid siren made of disappointment.”
“My toast was from the heart,” said the best man, who asked to be identified only as Braden. “The heart doesn't do grammar.”
The bride declined to take sides, noting that Uncle Edmund had also corrected the officiant (“whom”), the DJ (“fewer requests, not less”), and the cake (“the frosting said ‘congradulations,’ and honestly, on that one, he had a point”).
Grieve, reached at home, was unrepentant and, this reporter must confirm, extremely quotable. “People say language doesn't matter. These are the same people who have been mispronouncing fajita their entire lives. The Ledger's own reporting has vindicated the careful. I consider Saturday a rescue operation.”
The couple is honeymooning in San Diego. Grieve was not invited, “which is fine,” he said. “I've seen their itinerary. Two typos.”
Around the Valley runs whenever the Valley gives Dot something. The Valley always gives Dot something.