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.

[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."

[topaz_eyes]

I will die on Drabble Hill.

[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!

[melannen]

Sort of, but not really? Like there are of course weird exceptions (half-sibling marriage comes to mind, as is our society, where it's just kind of ~handwave~ I know it when I see it ~) but in most cases, incest is defined as marrying *in* to your close family group, and not-incest is marrying *out* of your close family group. It's how "close family group" is defined that varies widely!

But for example, if you live in a society where you're raised in your father's family home, then marrying your mother's first cousins probably isn't incest, but marrying your father's second cousins might be (and vice versa if you were raised in your mother's family home.) If you're raised in a society where you're considered a close relative of everyone in your totem-group, then you're expect to marry someone outside it. If you're raised in a society where close family is only parents and children, often it's okay to marry anyone who isn't in your direct line. If you're raised in a society with small, close-knit extended families on both sides, you may have to double-check to make sure you're not third cousins. If adoptees/foster children are expected to break all ties with their birth families, it's usually sibling incest, but if they're expected to maintain close ties with their birth families, it usually isn't.

But generally people covered under the incest taboo are considered to be people you *already* have the closest of family ties with, so making marriage-bonds with them won't help you much, and therefore you're pushed out to forge new ones.

That's actually a large part of the evidence that cultural incest taboos aren't really about genetic inbreeding - if they were, it wouldn't matter if they were your mom's cousins or your dad's, and a huge number of societies make that distinction. It's about creating bonds between different family groups for mutual support.

[conuly]

Yes, but what hills are those?

[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.

[conuly]

Oh, I totally get what you're saying and completely agree. (This sounds sarcastic, but I don't want to erase my adjectives. I'm not being sarcastic.)

[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.)

[melannen]

I just wish more people who shipped blood relatives (especially in fantasy settings!) got what I'm saying ;_; (If only because the kink is much more juicy if you work in the lack-of-outside-support-system aspect as much as you can!)

[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!

[kshandra]

You have my sword.

[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.

[melannen]

And my axe!

[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.

[melannen]

Yeah. My dad was convinced the the majority of the Bush administration's foreign policy choices could be placed squarely on them watching too much 24 (and vice versa).

[calimac]

No. "Crescendo" is not a non-technical word that was appropriated by specialists, in which case I might agree with you. It is, in English usage, purely a technical musical term that has been misunderstood by non-specialists. They might get away with this in other usages, but when they use it wrongly in regard to music, it really grates.

[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.

[conuly]

If they're using it when referring to music then they're using it in a technical sense but getting it wrong.

However, to be clear, I don't really care if the technical usage came first or second. I just don't think technicians get to claim certain words for themselves.

[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?!

[calimac]

We're not claiming it for ourselves. I'm perfectly happy to see it used metaphorically. I just want people to understand what the word means, has always meant, and - because it's encased in the literature - always will mean.

[conuly]

One of the earliest citations in literature is in The Great Gatsby. This is clearly not what it has always meant and there's no guarantee that this is what it always will mean.

[calimac]

No, that just proves that people have been using it wrongly for 50 years. If that's one of the earliest, it hasn't been very long. It's still wrong. Possibly it's the narrator using it wrongly and the author is signalling the character's ignorance. I see that kind of deliberate error in literature a lot.

[conuly]

Yeah, well, I forgot to say another hill I’ll die on is that people don’t make mistakes when speaking their own native language. If the word meant this 100 years ago and people use that meaning today then that’s what the word means.