Respond If You Please

Do Central Oregonians understand the term RSVP? Or is there a growing trend in our area to be rude?

As people in business it’s likely you get a lot of invitations to various events, meetings and luncheons. It’s nice that someone took the time to make sure you were on the list and invited you. You might want to take that as a compliment.

RSVP comes from the French expression répondez s’il vous plaît, meaning please respond. If RSVP is written on an invitation it means the invited guest, if they have good manners and values, should tell the host whether or not they plan to attend the event.

It’s just plan rude not to respond. A bogus excuse is that no one responds. Wrong. Polite, interesting and well-mannered people do respond.

I have to ask, since it does seem to occur in Central Oregon more often than not, is there a growing trend in our area to be rude? Do we think we’re special and can act like we’re rednecks and can conduct ourselves differently? Or, perhaps people no longer understand what the term means. Assuming the best, and that the reason guests don’t RSVP to an invitation is a case of ignorance, not rudeness, I am clarifying this for the record.

An incomplete list of respondents can cause numerous problems for a host including complexity in planning food quantities, issues relating to minimum guarantees with meeting halls and uncertainty over the number of seats to provide.

Even when you don’t know if you’re coming for sure until the last minute, you can respond with a maybe, at least the planner knows you got the invitation.

In today’s world it’s so much easier to respond to an invite because there’s usually an email, just no, just say yes, hit send. How hard is that?