We can just add this to the list of hills on which I intend to die:

[conuly]

Cousins aren't incest unless they're actually siblings by birth or adoption or were raised more or less in a sibling fashion. Cousin marriage is very common worldwide and throughout history, and unless you do it over and over again for generations it's not really a problem for your genes.

I'm not saying we all should boink our cousins today, but I really wish people would stop talking about how gross and squicky and incest it is when that's a far from universal opinion. Honestly, not all opinions need to be gratuitously shared. (And really, you gotta wonder what is going on when somebody feels the need to talk all about this at the very drop of a hat, which happens more often than you might think. I genuinely have no idea how I keep encountering people who just want to talk so much about how gross cousins are. It's not like I'm actively looking for things to annoy me! Trying to avoid it, in fact.)

Sooooooo... what hills do you all plan to die on?

Edit: I somehow forgot how people are. The very very biggest hill on which I will always make a stand is the basic principle that adult native speakers do not make mistakes in their own native speech. (Barring serious language-related disabilities and momentary disfluencies.) This is the very foundation of the science of linguistics, because the alternative belief, that language somehow manages to exist outside the speakers, doesn't make any sense.

So you're welcome to say that your hill is some word usage you hate, but I will fight you on that. Especially if you hate it because you think it's just immutably and objectively wrong.

Comments

[jhetley]

I don't intend to die on any hills. I intend to follow Patton's advice and make my enemies die on that hill.

[conuly]

Yes, but what hills are those?

[calimac]

Crescendo. I favor the natural evolution of language, but not a change in the meaning of a word that's also a technical term that's still in use. You can't say "reaches a crescendo." Crescendo means "getting louder" not "climax."

[conuly]

I only agree with this in one specific instance, and that's the usage of the word "grammar" by peevists to mean "things I like and don't like".

Spelling isn't grammar. Punctuation isn't grammar. Pronunciation isn't grammar. Word choice isn't grammar... except where it is, but not in the examples I'm thinking of. And I wouldn't mind except if you're going to fucking be prescriptivist then you really need to get it right.

But otherwise, no. There are too many words which have a technical meaning that the general public doesn't know about at all - undoubtedly there are some words like that which you use that would grate on an expert's ears! - and too many of those had their non-technical meaning before the specialists appropriated it for their own purposes.

[topaz_eyes]

I will die on Drabble Hill.

[kshandra]

You have my sword.

[swingandswirl]

YES.

I will grudgingly accept double and triple drabbles, but I will die on the additional hill of they must be 200 and 300 words, no more, no less.

[melannen]

My big one re: fandom is: Torture is not an effective way of obtaining accurate intel, and your protagonists should know that if intel-gathering is their job and they aren't incompetent.

(my big one about incest is: incest isn't nearly universally taboo because it will cause all your children to be disabled, like you said; even with sibling incest or parent/child it generally takes multiple generations for your odds to go up noticeably (and if you inbreed enough generations your odds go *down*). Incest is taboo because the more connections you make outside your birth family, the more resilient the whole community will be; the more different grandparents and great-uncles your kids have, the more independent supports they can call on. Incest is *creepy* when someone doesn't want their loved ones to have close connections outside of their blood family, for the same reasons.)

[conuly]

Incest is taboo all over, but one weird thing is that other than parent- child it seems every group defines it differently. Pairings that are super forbidden in one culture are preferred in another!

[conuly]

Oh also, re: torture - every once in a while I watch some early 2000s TV and am slammed back into the realization that media of that era was really dedicated to telling us that torture works.

[elisi]

I appreciate your hill, considering that my parents are cousins. (They didn't know each other growing up, so they were basically strangers when they met as adults.)

[conuly]

That's easily 50% of my objection to people going on and on about it, yes - it's not really that rare, and if you are weirdly fixated on this one topic sooner or later you're going to be overheard by somebody who has a strong personal reason to be offended.

[grav_ity]

Also, it's a great way to deal with inheritance issues *especially* if there's, like, a kingdom at stake, because it condenses the claimants!

[conuly]

Mmm. I'm not sure it does. I think the best way to condense the claimants is to limit the number of legitimate children people have.

[peristaltor]

In support of your hill: Charles Darwin married his cousin. His sister had already married another cousin (in the same family as Emma Wedgwood). So when their families gathered, all the little Wedgwoods and Darwins had the same grandparents. Yeah. It goes way back. And except for two of the little Darwins (who died as children), the seven born to the couple did pretty well.

My Hill! Irony. It is simply defined wrong by sooo many, including dictionaries.

To be truly ironic, one must be sincere in their stated belief or understanding (the one that happens to also be wrong). Therefore, it should not ever be used as a synonym for "sarcasm."

I mean, seriously! We have the word sarcasm. Why not use it when you're being sarcastic?!

[conuly]

People don’t make mistakes in their own native language. Well, other than momentary disfluencies.

[moon_custafer]

I once came across a deeply annoying article that tried to claim the majority of Charles and Emma’s children were “sterile” due to inbreeding – but they included the ones who never married.

[silveradept]

I believe it is in the books of Moses that the Deity Represented By the Tetragrammaton commanded that in specific circumstances, if a married man died, his brother is expected to marry the widow and continue from there. That can't possibly have always been in a situation where it would observe rules of our time about consanguinity.

A hill that I will stab people from the top of is "words have meanings, and the word selected for the situation has been chosen for the nuances involved. Do not substitute it for another and use that word and its meaning when responding."

(Note that this is not the hill of "words have fixed, immutable, meanings and therefore have 'right' and 'wrong' usage.")

[conuly]

(Note that this is not the hill of "words have fixed, immutable, meanings and therefore have 'right' and 'wrong' usage.")

Oh good, because as two commenters here have bumped into that is the very biggest hill on which I am taking my stand and always will. I, uh, probably should've made that clear in the main post. It wasn't relevant to what I was saying, but now that I've waded into it I remember that I do know how people are.

[gisho]

I think I've just discovered a new hill! To wit, "Language is a tool for communication, is not determined by prescription but IS determined by consensus. An adult native speaker using language in a way that confuses other speakers is factually wrong, and an adult native speaker using language in a way that makes that language less useful (for example, by using 'literally' figuratively and thereby introducing confusion wheh other people use it literally) may not be factually wrong, but should be severely discouraged just as anyone advancing the figurative roll of the Euphemism Treadmill should be discouraged."

[conuly]

Why are people so worked up about the use of the word "literally" when they don't care one whit about the exact same usage of the word "really"?

Also, that usage is not new at all. The original definition of the word "literal" means "of or relating to letters". Almost immediately after it first gained its figurative meaning of "true" it also gained its other figurative purpose as an intensifier. There's, like, less than two decades difference between the two senses, and they've both been around for 300 years and counting.

(And nobody in the history of the world has ever been confused by the use of the word "literally" as an intensifier, no more than they're confused by the same exact sense of the word "really". Except they pretend to be confused by phrases like "My mom literally blew up" and "He was literally having kittens" and they don't pretend to be confused by "My mom really exploded" and "He was really shitting bricks".)

[conuly]

But, you know what, if you want to hold tight to the one and only non-figurative sense of the word "literal", and insist it should only be used to mean "of or relating to letters" then more power to you.

[chazzbanner]

I'm sure I have a hill, but .. this is to agree about cousin marriages. I'm a genealogist, I see them going way, way back in the US/colonies/Britain, and it doesn't faze me at all. All the fandom "ewww" about cousin marriage in Austen or Heyer really annoys me.

[conuly]

If it squicks them out so much they can read something else.

[gwydion]

I think there is a difference between me personally not wanting to do anything with my cousins, and other people doing it. I have too large a knowledge of history and culture not to have been used to the idea of it.

Consenting adults? No weird coercive shit going on? Not my business.

[conuly]

Sure. You definitely don't need to date your cousins, for whatever reason floats your boat... or, uh, doesn't. Most relationships aren't incest, but that doesn't mean that you should have relations with most of the world!

[altamira16]

Thank you for choosing this hill to die on.