The definition of “second cousin” being the offspring of the parents’ first cousins seems to go back several hundred years.
However, in common parlance, it’s not unusual to hear (or at least it wasn’t) a “first cousin once removed” as “second cousin.” I’ve heard this used, and have even heard it used in a television program from the early 1960s, so I assume the writer had been familiar with the term before then.
How far back does this colloquialism [“second cousin” as “first cousin once-removed”] go?
Feel free to post “I’m 95 years old, and I’ve NEVER heard it used like this, too. I’ll take the free bump:D
What’s the evidence that it is deliberately being used that way, and not just a mistake by someone who doesn’t know the actual definition of the term? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard “second cousin” used that way, except by someone who didn’t actually know what a “first cousin once removed” was.
The snarkish part of me wants to say it’s been used that way as long as there have been stupid people.
The charitable part of me replies that Nth Cousin Yth removed is pretty much a term of geneological art, and its misuse by persons who don’t understand it is no more surprising than people thinking that the theory of evolution means that humans are descended from gorillas.
The snarkish part of me counters that the charitable part’s argument is pretty much equivalent to the people are stupid remark.
And now the charitable part of me is pulling a knife and saying “Bring it, punk!”
I didn’t know what “1st cousin once removed” was until I was in my mid-twenties. We used the term second-cousin for what is really 1st cousin once removed when I was growing up as well. It wasn’t a mistake. That was the only term we had for it. It is common to here it expressed that way.
How is it not a mistake to use the wrong term in place of the correct one?
It’s the same here. People say second cousin when they mean first cousin once removed. They don’t understand what removed means but they know what a cousin is so it makes a sort of sense to them. In the grand scheme of things it rarely matters so I don’t generally pick people up on it (unless they are involved in documenting their family history in some way, in which case it does matter a bit more).
I’m 61, and as a child listened to relatives in their 70s using it to mean what “first cousin once removed” means to a genealogical precisionist or a linguistic pedant. That’s anecdotal, but it shows it as a common usage going back on the order of 100 years (they were talking of relatives who died before 1910, FWIW).
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Total hijack, but because it’s a story I love telling:
My maternal grandmother had four brothers, who were thus my great-uncles. One of them, who would have been my Uncle Will had he lived, married a woman, Zilpha (accurate spelling of her name; we suspect the family misspelled the Biblical name Zilpah in naming her), who thus became my great-aunt by marriage.
When my parents married, they discovered to their pleased surprise that Mom’s Aunt Zilpha was Dad’s mother’s second cousin (precisionist definition: Grandma’s father was first cousin to Aunt Zilpha’s mother). So my great-aunt by marriage on one side of the family was also my second cousin twice removed by blood on the other.
But it gets better: After Uncle Will’s death, Aunt Zilpha converted the upper floor of her home into a rental apartment, which she let out to a young family who had married during WWII. With one of their little girl’s natural grandmothers in the grave already and the other living 700 miles away, she became “honorary grandmother” to the little girl until her own death. And played matchmaker between her honorary granddaughter and her only great-nephew.
When Barb nd I married, Aunt Zilpha was in her grave. But we had an empty place setting at our wedding reception to her honor and memory. It was the least we could do for somebody related to us three different ways!
The problem is that “second cousin” and “first cousin once removed” mean two entirely different things. If the terms are used interchangeably, how do you know what someone’s talking about?
I’m just waiting for someone to come in with, “that’s so proscriptivist! If the language has evolved so that people are used to calling it ‘second cousin’ now, who are you to tell them that it isn’t ‘second cousin?’”
On the other hand, many of my Chinese colleagues are firmly convinced that the cousin of one’s father or mother should be called “uncle” or “auntie” in English.
Looking at the Wikipedia entry for “cousin”, it says that two people who share a great-grandparent are second cousins (i.e. my father’s first cousin’s child is my second cousin). Is that wrong?
(I have to admit I’ve always been a little hazy on “first cousin once removed” and “second cousin”.)
That’s the problem you run into with words like biweekly or bimonthly.
I try to use bimonthly- every two months, semimonthly- twice a month, but then if you use fortnightly - every two weeks, you end up with biweekly - twice a week.
Which is confusing! bimonthly would be every two months, and biweekly would mean twice a week. There is no good way out of that dilemma.
biannual, on the other hand, seems to mean only twice a year.
I wonder if everyone in this thread lamenting the incorrect use of “second cousin” actually agrees on the correct meaning of “first cousin once removed.”
Well, for my part, I take “first cousin once removed” to mean (for example) my relationship with my first cousin’s kids, and their relationship with me. My grandparent is their great-grandparent.
I am Southern and there are multiple forms of aunts and uncles in Southern English. One of those forms is a much older cousin so I can understand that usage. I have some of those types of uncles as well.
In direct address, “aunt” and “uncle” are often frequently used to mean “adult about one generation older than the speaker who is related by blood or affection.”
I acknowledge that ‘first cousin twice removed’ for your first cousin’s grandchild or your grandparent’s first cousin is correct but I wish they’d change it; ‘third cousin’ is just easier to compute and gives more of a notion of how distant or close the relationship is.
So, from that chart, I see that “First cousin twice removed” means two different things:
my (first) cousin’s grandchild, OR my grandparent’s (first) cousin.
As you mentioned in your post. In general, Xst cousin Y times removed can always mean two different things.
They certainly mean completely different things and it’s certainly silly to say you can use them incorrectly without being incorrect. But the real problem is that people are unlikely to know with precision what either term means with any certainty. Nobody in my family nor anybody else I’m friendly with could define a cousin-nth-removed and very few even know what a 2nd or 3rd cousin is with certainty.
So I disagree that using the terms interchangeably causes problems, I’d argue the terms are so poorly understood by most that they inherently cause problems.
I used to tell people about my step first cousin once removed-in-law until my dad got divorced and she became my ex-step-first-cousin-once-removed-in-law.
