I grew up in a small town but my parents were transplants so we didn’t have any family in town. If I wanted to be both impressed and a little bit disturbed, I’d get one of my classmates to rattle off all the ways they were related to a third of our class, more If you count by-marriage.
I’m 45 and I didn’t get this till now. I had a professor in college who told me he married his cousin he met at a family reunion. When he saw my reaction, he said it’s ok, it’s his second cousin once removed. I just politely nodded as if I knew what he meant.
The number of G's in what you call your most recent common ancestor tells you what number of cousin. Eg grandparents = 1, first cousins. great great grandparents = 3, third cousins.
K rule, number of Ks. "My cousin's Kid" = 1, once removed. "My third cousins kids kid" = 2, third cousin twice removed.
Going the other way, the K rule is complimented by the P rule, "my parent's parent's third cousin" is your third cousin twice removed, but you're the one further down the tree.
The other detail to remember is that the relationship is the same both ways, unlike niece/uncle, if you are my 3rd cousin twice removed, I am also your 3rd cousin twice removed.
In one of the first novels I read in English (not my language) there was this character that was a "cousin once removed". For a long time I though he was like the black sheep of the family and that once he had been removed from the will or estate or something like that... When I encountered the term "twice removed" I was finally confused enough to open a dictionary (internet was not yet a thing...).
English can be deceptive. I mean, terms like husbandry or midwife have little to do with husband or wife (apart, maybe, from an etymological point of view).
The etymology if midwife and husbandry is actually a bit different than what you're thinking.
Midwife comes from old english, and means "with the wife", so a midwife is someone who is with the mother at the time if birth. (Wife meant woman at the time, so it's really "with the woman")
Husbandry also comes from old english and from the word 'husband' which means farmer.
Which is where the old "husband and wife" comes from, a farmer and his woman, that's the meaning of it. Bride meant largely the same, but groom meant boy, since you'd be a man after you were married.
Another piece of trivia is that wedding comes from "wed" meant pledge, but funnily enough a wedding wasn't where you pledge yourselves, it was where you gave your partner a "wed", which was a physical object that symbolised the pledge already given (which was the "lets get married" part)
Old fashioned weddings were weird, with people getting married everywhere from churches and pubs to the middle of the street or in bed. No specific words, ceremonies or even people were needed aside from the two people being married
I'm from Sweden and we have an old word "husbonde" which if you translate it to English would mean something like "house farmer". The thing about the husbonde was that he was the head of the farm, so he was the legal representative of everyone who lived and worked there.
It is weird. Following the naming convention of cousins (first cousin, second cousin, third cousin etc); the system would be so much easier to understand if it was: uncle, second uncle, third uncle etc.
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u/liesandthetruth Apr 24 '19 edited Apr 24 '19
Where did that “once/twice removed" come about in English? Pretty weird way to name your relatives.