Jun 16th, 2009

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. (more…)