WTN: avuncular
James Harbeck
avuncular
Hey, how are ya? Doing great? I found out something interesting you might like. A couple of things, in fact. The first thing is, it turns out that although I have three nephews and two nieces, I can’t be literally, etymologically, avuncular to all of them. Figuratively, sure, and that’s fine, of course. But that leads to the second thing: there are more English words than you might think that come from Latin kinship terms. And if you start trying to be literal about them all, you’re going to make trouble for yourself. It’s your life, of course! But just in case you wanted to know.
Isn’t it nice how uncles are assumed to be friendly and caring in a down-home, benevolent kind of way? That’s what we mean with the term avuncular, which, along with broadly meaning ‘kind, benevolent, tolerant (especially in the manner of an older person to a younger one)’, literally means ‘of, relating to, or like an uncle’. Except the Latin original, avunculus – from avus ‘grandfather’ and the diminutive suffix -unculus – refers only to the maternal uncle. You know, the mother’s brother – or, yes, the mother’s sister’s husband. So since my wife’s sister has two kids, I am literally avuncular to them. My brother’s three kids, though? Nope, sorry. Not etymologically literally, anyway.
But of course sticking to the Latin meaning of these terms would be atavistic. It would be not grandfathering the senses but great-great-great-grandfathering them – because, yes, atavistic relates to atavus, which means ‘great-great-great-grandfather’ – or just ‘ancestor’. That’s from the same avus (‘grandfather’) plus at-, which is a form of ad-, meaning ‘to’, ‘toward’, and a whole bunch of other things.
But let’s take a look at some of the other terms we have in English that come from Latin terms for family members. There are the literal ones like maternal (from mater, ‘mother’), paternal (from pater, ‘father’), and uxorial (from uxor, ‘wife’, which also gives us uxorious, ‘highly devoted to one’s wife’). There are the ones that have both literal and figurative uses, like fraternal (frater, ‘brother’), sororal (soror, ‘sister’; sorority is the most common English descendant), and novercal (noverca, ‘stepmother’ – and in the figurative use of the term, the stepmotherliness is generally wicked). There’s also nepotism, from nepos, which can mean ‘nephew’, ‘niece’, ‘grandson’, or ‘granddaughter’ – our use of nepotism to refer to hiring family members (especially direct offspring) comes from when the popes of the Middle Ages and Renaissance would appoint their nephews as cardinals.
We also have some other less common ones. There’s the term the levirate, which I first encountered in an anthropology book where the author, in categorizing various cultures, divided them between those that “practice the levirate” and those that don’t, but did not even once explain what “the levirate” was. Well, it comes from Latin levir ‘husband’s brother’ and refers to the practice of requiring a woman whose husband has died to marry her husband’s brother. (“Oh, that. Of course!”)
There’s no corresponding term for marrying a deceased wife’s sister, presumably because that’s not a widespread cultural practice, but in any case Latin somehow didn’t even have a special term for that relation; a wife’s sister is just soror uxoris. A wife’s brother is similarly frater uxoris. But oh, by the way, a husband’s sister is glos; if we had an adjective based on that, it would probably be gloral, but we don’t. (If your husband’s sister is named Gloria, that would be close, though not actually related – except by marriage, of course.)
We also don’t have a word socral from socrus ‘mother-in-law’ and socer ‘father-in-law’, which really seems a missed opportunity. We do have a word materteral, ‘of or like an aunt’, the counterpart to avuncular – not broadly used, but it can mean ‘auntyish’. But, like avuncular, it refers only to the mother’s sister (matertera is just mater plus a contrastive suffix). The father’s sister is amita, apparently formed as a diminutive of ama, which basically translates as ‘mommy’. No word on – or for – what your father’s sister is supposed to be like; amital is not a thing, though its homophone amytal is a synonym for amobarbital and is seen in sodium amytal, the sedative that is supposedly “truth serum”… so who knows, maybe your aunt on your father’s side is prone to telling you the plain truth.
Which brings us to your uncle on your father’s side. If I’m not an avunculus to my brother’s kids, what am I? I’m a patruus. As it happens, we don’t have an English word derived from that – such as patrual. But in Latin, the patruus stereotypically was indeed prone to telling the truth – and not in a kindly, avuncular way. Patrual, if it existed, would mean more like ‘severely reproving’ or ‘brutally critical’. As it happens, we do have a term in English for someone sort of like that (though maybe more blunt than actually mean): Dutch uncle.
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