idioms - Can one "marry one's wife"?


I was vacantly reading the paper the other day when I came across a strange formation in the obituary: "he married his wife in 19XX". I was rather taken aback by this; surely he can't marry his own wife. He could attempt to marry someone else's wife, and that would be bigamy. But surely marrying one's own wife is a logical impossibility?



Answer



I think "he married his wife" is merely redundant, not illogical. (However, in terms of language, bear in mind that it need not be proven logical in order to be considered grammatical English and to be understood by everyone.)


I think it is quite normal to have an attribution (e.g. relationship, title, name, etc.) be understood to be the person that fits that attribution at the time of the utterance or writing. Now, this isn't always done, but I think it is the default assumption, and it is also logically consistent.


This is why, in news articles, we see things like, "Sean Penn and then-wife Madonna were often seen at...". If the referent of "wife" is dependent on the tense or timeframe of the sentence it is in, then there would be no need to say "then-wife", you could just say "wife".


Think of other examples where this is done every day:



President Obama attended Occidental College.



But he wasn't president when he was in college.



My father was in the army for a few years.



But he wasn't my father before I was born.


And so on. I think that once you start thinking about it, you will see it is actually done all the time, and you probably didn't even notice.


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