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Comment by nly | Hacker News Reader

Why would you want to spend $31k on a wedding when you can spend that over a couple of years and create literally months of amazing memories, travelling and/or experiencing things together? I'd like to think the kind of people spending that much can do both, but the article claims this is the 'average cost'. wtf?

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Here's a case where the median and average cost could be quite far apart.

Indeed:

> In 2012, when the average wedding cost was $27,427, the median was $18,086. In 2011, when the average was $27,021, the median was $16,886. In Manhattan, where the widely reported average is $76,687, the median is $55,104. And in Alaska, where the average is $15,504, the median is a mere $8,440.

Luckily, these are not national figures, merely numbers reported by visitors of a particular website. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any more representative numbers, especially with expenses measured against income level.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/weddings/2013/06/average_...

Because certain people in this world, narcissistic people, are desperate to put on displays of status before their peers, and fantasize about the effects such displays have on their social standing, and in other cases, some are capable of doing both of the things you've mentioned, and there there are those who actually do, in fact, do both.

> Because certain people in this world, narcissistic people, are desperate to put on displays of status before their peers, and fantasize about the effects such displays have on their social standing

Maybe for some, but having an expensive wedding is usually unavoidable when the basics (venue and food) are the bulk of that cost.

There are these things called "mother-in-laws" that try and make it as hard as possible to save money on weddings.

Technically they're called "mothers-in-law".

Not really. Both usages are common in spoken and written English.

As someone for whom English is not the first language, I have only ever heard the latter form. Thank you for sharing this information.

Mother-in-laws is incorrect because it makes the wrong word plural. There are two ways to look at it. The first is that "-in-law" is essentially an adjective, and unlike in other languages (e.g., Spanish), adjectives are not pluralized if describing plural nouns. (This is also why it is Attorneys General and not Attorney Generals.) Second, that it are the mothers, not the laws, that is being pluralized.

This may be a common mistake, but it is a mistake nonetheless.

Edit: Grammar. :)

[overconfident(?) comment by someone who has taken exactly one (1) linguistics class]

That seems prescriptivist.

If people take "Mother-in-law" to be a single word, then it is a single word. And if they take "Mother-in-laws" to be the plural of this word, then it is the plural of that word.

Language is determined by usage. People do not say "s-in-law" , they say "in-laws".

I don't mean that you can't have a preference that usage be a particular way. I might even encourage it. If you prefer people using "mothers-in-law" over "mother-in-laws" for the reasons you gave, that's fair. Go ahead and try to convince people to say it that way. Maybe they will agree with you, that doing it only that way has advantages. I can certainly see doing it that way having advantages in some cases.

But for it to be "wrong", there has to be some standard for it to be "wrong" by.

When speaking about english as it is spoken, the standard is pretty much the ways in which people speak it.

[/overconfident(?) comment by someone who has taken exactly one (1) linguistics class]

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