Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/11/the-cousin-explainer-is-very-h.html
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Trust me, no one can explain my wacky and wonderful cousins!
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Obligatory…
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That clearly comes from a more civilized time/place where nobody felt the need to draw the “ok to boink” line.
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Like in that classic country song, “First Love, Second Cousin”…
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It also omits the category of “double cousin”, e.g. children from when your mother’s brother marries your father’s sister. I have several double cousins, including one with profound developmental problems. She was very fond of asking me loudly “Am I your double cousin, Bob?” in public places.
I am from Arkansas. There is no actual incest (or “cousincest”) involved in any of these relationships.
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Kissing cousins depends on jurisdiction. The more nine-great grandparents you have (max 1024) the healthier and more beautiful you’re likely to be. Probably.
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aka “The Safe Zone” Which is a county in West Virginia, Kentucky and maybe Georgia.
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Neat. I’ve never heard of that term before.
So my buddy’s brother married a triplet. And his brother-in-law married another of the same triplets. So his sister-in-law’s sister is his wive’s sister-in-law. Though at one point he mused, “What is my son going to call the third triplet?” I replied, “Oh, that’s easy, they are all aunts. Even if one isn’t related by marriage.” (I had many “aunts” when I was a kid, even if only one was actually my great aunt. Very similar to people from India have many aunties and uncles.)
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Really anywhere with isolated small populations and little movement into or out of a community. Any community small and insular enough will have everybody related in some way. Including some you might not expect like European royal families. A community doesn’t have to be geographically isolated to be biologically isolated. Strict religious sects can run into the same problem.
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There are lots of cases where someone is just a friend of the parents but the kids call them Aunts/Uncles.
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I haven’t heard the term anywhere else, either - I think my family invented it. {shudders}
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Nice stereotype, but pretty incorrect. WV and KY both outlaw marriage and KY outlaws foolin’ around with cousins. KY’s laws might be the most restrictive in the country. Lot’s of other states are just fine with that sort of stuff.
Be sure to check out the chart. Red mean banned, blue means legal if you want to skip the link.
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(snickering) My grandpa and his many marriageable sisters fled their shithole country through chain migration. If they had stayed, they would have all died as impoverished virgins because they had no dowries. After arriving in the sparsely populated semi-desert where we thrived, they discovered that a live, human female inured to poverty is a hot commodity to pioneer farmers. Fast-forward three generations…
My second cousins are simultaneously snotty to me, and yet try to convince me that we’re ‘not really’ related, that our grandparents were only step-siblings (they weren’t - I have copies of the birth certificates), and that it’s okay to date them. I remind them that I’ve attended their failed weddings as FAMILY, and was seated on the groom’s side.
BTW, none of us live in our isolated rural community anymore, and we all went to college out-of-state.
Live, human female…
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CGP Gray made a grade video about family trees a few years ago.
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“First cousin, once removed” gets a lot of play in that chart!
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Ah, no, don’t worry - I had several sets of double cousins amongst my classmates in our tiny backwater school. This would be the same school when, during a study hour, we tried through diagrams to untangle all of the entwined family bloodlines. When it was my turn to explain how and where my parents met, I dropped the bomb that my parents met at an inter-campus fraternity/sorority mixer. Laughing, they repeatedly asked how the two families knew each other before they started dating. I replied, “Well, they didn’t. The families were introduced to each other after dating awhile.” [Stunned silence from my classmates]: “You mean your parents were STRANGERS?!”
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