Every party, wedding, and event invitation we receive includes the phrase RSVP, but do we really understand what it means?
Many of us are completely off the mark.
For years, many people have mistakenly believed it to imply “reply swiftly via postal mail” or “respond very promptly to request.”
It turns out that we need to improve our linguistic abilities.
Social media is flooded with inquiries from people trying to understand the meaning of the commonly used abbreviation, and some of their answers are amusing.
The cosmetics company Art Natural posted a brief video on TikTok asking employees in its office what RSVP stands for.
The majority of people couldn’t even decide whether the “R” was for react or reserve.
Some commenters even went so far as to assume it meant “reservation for very important person.”
The phrases “respond soon by phone” and “respond soon by mail,” “respond soon for party,” and “reserve soon very rapidly” were also suggested.
I genuinely always believed that was,’respond soon through post,’ said one reader.
It also means, astonishingly, “Please reserve special car parking.”
However, two of the persons in the video uploaded to the @artnaturals page were more accurate when they asserted that the acronym is a product of the French language.
The acronym RSVP stands for the French proverb “répondez s’il vous plaît.”
This translates to “please respond” in English.
Despite having only four letters, the acronym is actually not as hard as it first appears to be.
The phrase for react in French is “répondez,” and “s’il vous plaît,” which is simplified to “please,” means “if you please.”
Fortunately, we don’t have to speak French to tell our pals we want to attend their wedding, but at least now we can decipher what their invitation is saying.
People have only recently come to understand what AM and PM mean.
The terms “ante meridiem” and “post meridiem,” which are related to time, are actually abbreviations.
These words are in Latin and mean “before noon” and “after noon.”
