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At the dog park I’m often asked if Charlie and Rusty are brother and sister.
Charlie left & Rusty right
The short answer is yes.
The long answer is complicated.
Charlie and Rusty have the same father. But they have different mothers, and those mothers are sisters. This makes Charlie and Rusty half-siblings and cousins at the same time.
This is both interesting — I think, anyway — and kind of icky. People get a funny expression when I lay it all out for them. Maybe that has to do with the mental gymnastics required to work through the various relationship permutations. Or maybe it’s because the questioners can’t help imagining the human equivalent. Pity the nice lady who asks about our cute pups, only to find herself processing unwanted thoughts of
Her sister having a baby with her husband
or
Herself having a baby with her brother-in-law
Ick, indeed. So in the spirit of politeness, these days I just say yes and leave it at that.
All of this would be much easier if we had a nice, tidy word that stood for Charlie and Rusty’s sibling/cousin connection. Something precise, and yet socially acceptable. You’d think one would exist, maybe some obscure term used only by the keenest of family tree enthusiasts. After all, there must be historical examples of widowers marrying their late wives' sisters. Don’t tell me there weren’t cholera-ridden hamlets in the 18th century absolutely chockablock with this kind of thing.
And yet there doesn’t seem to be a word in English for the offspring of such arrangements. I tried looking. Google gave me nothing, as did ancestry.com. Chat GPT came up with “paternal half-siblings through their maternal aunts” which is nothing short of an abomination. We seem to have stumbled into a linguistic gap.
So I have a suggestion. The Latin for cousin is cognatus. And for sibling the Romans tended to use frater. Why not smush them together? I hereby present to you… frognatus!
If only I could just say, “You think my doggies are cute? Thank you so much; that’s very kind of you. Yes, we got them from the same breeder. In fact, they’re frognati.” How simple! How efficient! How polite!
This is the word English doesn’t realize it needs.