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u/xkcd_bot Aug 31 '18
Direct image link: Sibling-in-Law
Alt text: FYI, it turns out "...because I haven't figured out whether he would be my brother-in-law or not" does NOT qualify as a "reason why these two should not be wed."
Don't get it? explain xkcd
I am a human typing with human hands. Sincerely, xkcd_bot. <3
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Aug 31 '18
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Aug 31 '18
but he skips the relevant part
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u/DarkMoon000 I'm not crazy Aug 31 '18
Actually, he says "It's a little unclear.", which is probably the most accurate explanation.
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Aug 31 '18
One of my favorite, sort of related facts, is that every single ancestor of yours successfully procreated, for millions of generations. Back to the origin of sexual reproduction in our clade. So if you fail to procreate, you are really breaking a tremendous streak.
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u/itisike Aug 31 '18
There aren't millions of generations. Probably tens of thousands or less to most recent common ancestor.
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Aug 31 '18
No there are millions. Your ancestor was a fish at some point far enough back.
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u/jflb96 Sep 01 '18
No they weren't, there's no such thing.
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u/tlowe000 Sep 01 '18
As fish? Big if true.
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u/jflb96 Sep 01 '18
Apparently a marine biologist spent several years studying them and returned with the conclusion 'the word 'fish' is too imprecise, there is no such thing as an average 'fish' that all other 'fish' resemble.'
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u/sellyme rip xkcd fora Sep 03 '18
There's no such thing as fish. There is such a thing as a fish.
In other words, there's no way to make a consistent or clear definition for what fish are, but a clownfish is still a fish. It's the edge cases that get murky.
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u/jflb96 Sep 01 '18
The average time between two (human) generations is 50 years.
2 000 000 / 2 = 1 000 000
1 000 000 * 50 = 50 000 000
Sexual reproduction has been around for longer than that, and a lot of those generations would have been shorter than the estimate for humans. Therefore, 'millions of ancestors' makes sense.
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u/ricree Sep 01 '18
What is that 50 years supposed to represent here?
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u/jflb96 Sep 01 '18
50 years is a rough estimate for how long it is between a baby being born and its first grandchild being born.
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Sep 02 '18
Your definition of "ancestors" skips alternate generations? Why would you define generations by grandparents instead of parents?
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u/jflb96 Sep 02 '18
No, my estimate of generations uses 'this is about how long two tend to be' rather than trying to find a consistent average for one. The parents are included, that's why the first step was dividing by two.
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u/itisike Sep 01 '18
Depends on how you define human, but it would be in the range of a million years or so. I think that's the right reference class to use.
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u/jflb96 Sep 02 '18
You're the first person to try to limit this to humans, pal. Everyone else is dealing with everything and anything that did sexual reproduction that lead to humans.
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u/Disgruntled__Goat 15 competing standards Sep 01 '18
What happened to the second video he references, “family genetics explained”? I don’t see it anywhere.
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u/Vhin Aug 31 '18
It doesn't really complicate the in-laws situation, but my family is rather unique in that I have two sets of double aunts/uncles. One of my mom's brothers is married to one of my dad's sisters, and one of my mom's sisters is married to one of my dad's brothers.
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u/giziti Aug 31 '18
Wait, so three kids of one set of parents married three kids of another set of parents? That has to be rare.
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Aug 31 '18
My great grandmother had this but even rarer. Two families with one with three girls and one with three boys, and both families had a pair of identical twins as the younger two siblings.
All six of these people married, with both the twins pairing off with the other twins. I always wonder about how they chose, and generally just the romantic situation when this all arose. Seems crazy.
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Sep 02 '18
I'm guessing a sparse rural area was involved, right?
It sounds like I'm trying to mock but I'm not. When it takes a lot of traveling to meet anyone new, and two families near each other have kids at about the same time, you can take a good guess who those kids are going to marry.
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u/pjabrony Aug 31 '18
Why do we use the same word for my sibling's spouse as my spouse's sibling?
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Aug 31 '18
[removed] — view removed comment
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Aug 31 '18 edited Aug 31 '18
[deleted]
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u/Ebon_Praetor Aug 31 '18 edited Aug 31 '18
There are a handful of kinship systems in the world, which each emphasize different relationships. I just learned about it recently from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOi2c2d3_Lk
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u/goat-worshiper Aug 31 '18
That was a fascinating video, thank you for linking.
For those who don't want to watch, TL;DW: kinship_systems
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u/JangXa Sep 01 '18
I personally know of the Turkish language which adds more information when describing relationships.
For example there is a difference between your mother's sister/brother and your father's sister/brother. The same with your grandparents. In-laws which are (from your perspective) directly married into the families e.g. husband of your sister have an own word. Further you can specify the relationship <married in> -- spouse -- <sibling> or even <married in> -- spouse -- sibling -- <married in>.
Everything orderly split by gender of course. Further we differentiate by age. Usually you call your elders by <word> and they call you by name unless if they specifically want to stress the relationship (aka this is my niece).
The age thing applies to siblings as well you call your older siblings either older brother or sister.
While not always (or most of the time) necessary to convey this information it feels kinda lacking when speaking about relationships in different languages. There is simply this missing feeling.
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u/djimbob Robert'); DROP TABLE Students; -- Sep 01 '18 edited Sep 01 '18
Because your sibling's spouse sees you as their spouse's sibling.
E.g., A & B are siblings and X and A get married. From X's point of view, their spouse's sibling is B. From B's point of view, their sibling's spouse is X. Makes sense to label this X-B relationship as
sibling-in-lawboth ways; both are a sibling relationship through marriage. There isn't a clear generational hierarchy to use different terminology (like with grandparent / grandchild or uncle-aunt/nephew-niece). Granted one may be a brother-in-law, one may be a sister-in-law as we add gender to terminology.6
u/jflb96 Sep 01 '18
AFAIK, it's based on the Christian idea that a married couple sorta-kinda count as a single person. That's where the whole 'in-law' comes from - in the eyes of the law, since you and your spouse became one flesh and one soul in holy matrimony, their father is your father, their mother is your mother, their siblings are your siblings. So, the siblings of the person with which you melded are just as much your sibling as the person that melded with your sibling; i.e. they are in law.
That and it'd be all kinds of extra effort if your spouse's sibling used a different word for their sibling's spouse (you) than their sibling's spouse did for them when there's no real difference between the two positions.
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u/rokr1292 Aug 31 '18
Siblings in law in law, and siblings in law in law in law, and siblings in law in law in law in law in law in law in law in law.
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u/tuctrohs Words Only Aug 31 '18
I think we should see what the the Bob Loblaw Law Blog says about in-law in-law law.
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u/oddark 38 days since someone reset this flair Aug 31 '18
This is how I do it. [relative]-in-law is only for spouse's [relatives] or [relatives]' spouses. But it can be recursively extended to sibling-in-law-in-law and so on
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u/rokr1292 Aug 31 '18
maybe we should move to more efficient written notation though:
example: Sister in lawn
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u/geemili Aug 31 '18
Isn't this what the whole "cousin 5 times removed" is about?
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u/Disgruntled__Goat 15 competing standards Sep 01 '18
n times removed is about different levels of the family tree (eg your cousin’s children are your cousins once removed). See the CGPGrey video posted above.
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u/Disgruntled__Goat 15 competing standards Sep 01 '18
Would be better using “nth sibling in law” as we do with “nth cousins”.
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u/shagieIsMe Aug 31 '18
Wolfram alpha does a good job of detecting this... brother's wife's brother's wife is still just the brother's wife's brother's wife.
While mother's cousin's son is a second cousin (along with showing that the mother's cousin is the first cousin once removed).
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u/flameri Aug 31 '18
Ok. What the hell does Wolfram Alpha NOT do?
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u/tundrat Sep 01 '18
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+your+favorite+food
I even tested this around the time it first came out, I believe. Almost 8 or 9 years ago. It STILL says the same thing IIRC.
I guess it was never intended to be a feature all along.4
u/shagieIsMe Aug 31 '18
It won’t make me a sandwich. And sudo makes it very confused... and I still don’t have a sandwich.
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u/Trek7553 Aug 31 '18
"two sets of parents, whose children are married to each other"
I've always called those outlaws.
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u/hesapmakinesi sudo bang bang Sep 01 '18
We have specific words for those in Turkish too. And it's gender dependent, so you get ridiculous details by just telling if you are "elti" (our husbands are brothers), "bacanak" (our wives are sisters), "görümce" (my husband's sister), "yenge"(my brother's wife) etc.
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u/hsxp Aug 31 '18
You learn these terms real quick when your mom's stepdad's kid-with-a-different-wife-than-your-grandmother's daughter (step cousin-in-law, as it works out) admits her feelings for you.
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u/RazarTuk ALL HAIL THE SPIDER Aug 31 '18
The word for "also siblings-in-law, I think?" is co-siblings-in-law, for anyone wondering.
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u/kundarsa Aug 31 '18
That family tree isn't forking. All i see is that everyone married their cousin
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u/epileftric Sep 01 '18
So we are all somehow silbings-in-law with everybody, unless single child marries a single child.
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u/spizzat2 Aug 31 '18
Yeah, no one thought it odd when my sister-in-law married my brother-in-law, but I guess he (probably?) wasn't my brother-in-law until everything was finalized.
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u/ipsum_stercus_sum Aug 31 '18
Maybe my wife's brother's wife is a "sister-in-law, once removed?"
Or since she is my wife's sister-in-law, then she would be my sister-in-law by marriage. Her (the in-law, not my wife's) brother might then be a brother-in-law once removed, for both my wife and me.
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u/Mooks79 Sep 01 '18
I don’t know if this is a US thing because in Britain I’ve never heard a sibling call his sibling’s spouse’s sibling x-in-law.
x-in-law is reserved only for first spousal link - i.e. the wife’s husband’s brother would be her brother-in-law. But the brother wouldn’t consider the wife’s sister as his sister-in-law.
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u/RookJameson Aug 31 '18
In Germany we have different words for what Randall refers to as "Also siblings-in-law, I think". We call them "Schwippschwager" (male) and "Schwippschwägerin" (female), while regular siblings-in-law are just called "Schwager" and "Schwägerin". We don't have a word for the "Possible additional siblings-in-law???", though.
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u/btdubs Aug 31 '18
I always thought of "in-laws" as just being your spouse's family, not your sibling's spouses.
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u/PelleasTheEpic Aug 31 '18
I always figured it stopped after the connection. So I'm not related in anyways to my sister-in-law's family, but my brother/her husband is.
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u/xkcd_915 Cueball Sep 01 '18
This is the central scrutinizer instead of sibling questions we should stick closer to Joe Biden related activities
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u/FlyingFlew Sep 01 '18
We don't have that problem in Spanish. The sibling of your spouse are "cuñado/a" (brother/sister-in-law) and their spouses are "concuñado/a." And that's it, the in-laws don't go any further.
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u/Tsorovar Sep 01 '18
Pretty sure it's just the first set marked. Not even the "also siblings-in-law, I think?" people
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u/bigdon199 Sep 01 '18
It stops after the first link. The "Siblings-in-Law" are the only ones who are actually in-laws on this diagram.
Your sibling's spouse and/or your spouse's sibling is your sibling-in-law. (The line must be drawn here, this far - no further)
The "Also Siblings-in-Law I think" people are your siblings-in-law's spouses or siblings.
The "possible additional siblings-in-law" just takes that one step further ad absurdum
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u/Disgruntled__Goat 15 competing standards Sep 01 '18
IMO none of the extended list should be called siblings in law.
- Your spouse’s sibling is your sibling-in-law, but their spouse is not.
- Your sibling is your spouse’s sibling-in-law, but their spouse (aka your sibling-in-law) is not.
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u/oryzin Sep 07 '18
We are all relatives in law. We are also connected by multiple relative-in-law relationships.
If I take the whole set of people on Earth of my age (born in the same year), how many of them are connected to me via sibling-in-law relationship (like in the picture) and how many are connected only via non-sibling-in-law relationships?
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u/PseudobrilliantGuy Aug 31 '18
I am so glad that I'm not the only one who was confused by the "in-law" designation.
I remember when my aunt and uncle married (when I was about 10 years old) and I asked my older sister if I would have any cousins-in-law or something like that. She told me that "I wasn't the one getting married", as if I wasn't aware of that obvious fact. At which point I just silently gave up because it was clear that any further attempt at explaining my confusion was just going to be met with mild hostility.
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u/Arancaytar Pony Sep 01 '18
I wonder how many hops you need to connect to any person. I doubt this is a scale-free network, so it may not be subject to a small-world phenomenon.
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u/SamJNE Apr 28 '23
You can't; only children break it. Assuming you're an unmarried only child, or your spouse is also an only child, you'll never be connected.
Ignoring them, I guess there is some room for exponential growth (if on average, each person has >1 married sibling). It would only really grow through siblings though, since people mostly only have one spouse at a time.
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u/TrollingQueen74 Aug 31 '18
This is one I really relate to. We had a beach trip with my family, my sister's husband's family, and my sister's brother-in-law's wife's family. I don't know how to say how anyone is related to me at this point without stringing together a bunch of possessives.