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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

And don’t forget the kink that, in Breaking Bad, Walt uses the term to refer to his spouse’s sibling’s husband.

I absolutely do refer to my spouse's sibling's husband as my brother-in-law, I don't think that's that unusual?

Well it can be. To me, my spouse's sibling's husband is just...my spouse's sibling's husband and nothing else. Some vague acquaintance I may vaguely see once every decade when someone die or get married in my spouse family.

It really depends how tight knit families are and how families are spread accross the world. I have to take a plane and cross some borders in order to visit my parents or my sibling's and same applies to my partner so there is that.

In the show, they are close and meet up regularly. They even take care of their kids in crisis.

Which also makes sense - siblings who have good relationships meet up often and once having partners, those partners meet up too.

Think about it this way: your brother in law is your child's uncle.

…except when the uncle is your brother.

Only if all of your children are with the same spouse.

Right now at Apple's HQ: "New labels are required for ex-brother-in-law."

Most languages don’t have a word as generic as “uncle” in this context.

I found it neat to learn that Chinese has 5 separate words for what we in English call Uncle.

1. (father’s older brother) 伯父 [bófù] (位, wèi)

2. (father’s younger brother) 叔父 [shūfù] (位, wèi)

3. (father’s sister’s husband) 姑父 [gūfu] (位, wèi)

4. (mother’s brother) 舅父 [jiùfù] (位, wèi)

5. (mother’s sister’s husband) 姨父 [yífu] (位, wèi)

It gets even more complex when there are regional and family differences in the naming schema. For example, my cousins on my moms side and dads sides respectively use different words for some relations, and then they sometimes use an entirely different set of words with their other sides of the family. All in the same language, but based on background, dialect, etc. So my working knowledge of naming schema ends up being very, very large. Thankfully the relations they map to are standardized in the language so it's just word swapping.

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