Is in-law the best we can do?

While writing a blog post recently, I came to somebody whose relationship to me I couldn’t describe.  My genealogy software thankfully does this for me, so I looked her up. Wife of great-uncle. Isn’t that clumsy? And it also feels pretty impersonal: ‘after all, she was only the wife of my great-uncle‘.  It set me thinking.  Why don’t we have a word for relatives who come into our families by marriage?

We call them in-laws which is a practical enough legal term but there’s little affection in it.  I mean, how many mother-in-law jokes d’you know?  The French, unusually for such a pragmatic people, call the mother of your partner belle mere – hard to make jokes about her if she’s your ‘lovely mother’.   The term in-law doesn’t even extend that far. Brother, sister, mother, father.  We don’t say grandfather-in-law or niece-in-law.

It’s when we come to aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces,  that things really start to come unstuck. Wife of or husband of – that’s you put in your place. Don’t for a minute think that you’re a real part of my family – oh no – you just happened to marry my aunt/uncle/nephew/niece.  Which is nonsensical, because without outsiders marrying in, there would be no family! Which is why we start off (genealogically speaking) with 2 surnames, then 4, then 8 and so on until we’re all the way back to when Charlemagne’s  mother-in-law  married great-uncle x 15 Elfred.

Why is it that such a flexible and adaptive language as English has a name for cousins who are not directly related to us – 1st (or 2nd) cousin once (or twice) removed – but fails to have names for in-laws? Could it be because in the legal system of our country, relatives by marriage are pretty far down the pecking order?  If you make your will in which you wish an in-law to benefit by your demise, you better make sure you’ve put in a cast iron clause to that effect. Otherwise it’ll all go to blood relatives.

The question of  who exactly is a blood relative is one that will keep the legal profession and philosophers alike busy for many a year to come.  But that’s another subject.

To get back to the subject in hand then, should we be picketing somebody somewhere (the OED springs to mind) about proper terms for in-laws? And does anyone have ideas for what those terms would be? In the interests of research, I googled this very question. I’ll leave you with what I found.

Photo by Rhian vK

Q. Do you call your Aunt’s husband your uncle or just your aunt’s husband? A. I just call him “Mick”