Archive for the ‘Kinship’ Category

American Locomotive

February 16, 2025

From Joe Transue on Facebook on 2/12, as a comment on my 2/11 posting “On the faux-Hopper watch”, about Waiting for the train (an image that was merely inspired by Edward Hopper (1892-1967), not actually by him):


(#1) JT reported that this image came up on his feed out of nowhere, with the label: Edward Hopper. Locomotive 1944; there’s a lot to be said here, but one thing is absolutely clear: it is not a painting by Hopper; there are excellent catalogs of Hopper’s paintings, and neither this image (or anything like it) or this title (or anything like it) appears in the catalogs — but then it turns out that Hopper spent years (resentfully) churning out illustrations, for magazines and for advertisements, just to pay his bills, and these haven’t been catalogued, so who knows?

More things that are absolutely clear: that this image was in fact used in an ad (in Life magazine) in 1944, for ALCO (the American Locomotive Company); that the locomotive in the ad is an ALCO DL-109 diesel engine built between late 1939 and the spring of 1944; and that this ad appeared at a time when Hopper had been recognized as a major figure in American art and was in the midst of one of his most productive periods (in the 1930s and early 1940s, he painted New York Movie (1939), Girlie Show (1941), Nighthawks (1942), Hotel Lobby (1943), and Morning in a City (1944), among others), and cannot imaginably have been resorting to commercial illustration to pay his bills in 1944.

So where does #1 come from?

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Posted in Art, Design, Kinship, Language in advertising | Leave a Comment »

Ancestral investigations

March 26, 2024

In recent days, I’ve been exchanging e-mail with my (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi) linguistics colleague Luc Baronian about ethnic and linguistic history, with special reference to the Welsh (and the Welsh language, Cymraeg) in Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Dutch (and their language, Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch); and about tracing ancestral history. Three pieces of background here:

First, Luc is an Armenian-Canadian, the way I’m a Swiss-American. Luc is by recent paternal ancestry Armenian (as you can tell from his surname), by upbringing French Canadian; I am by recent paternal ancestry Swiss (as you can tell by my surname), by upbringing (and maternal ancestry) Pennsylvania Dutch (a descendant of primarily 18th-century immigrants to southeastern Pennsylvania, mostly from the Palatinate region of southern Germany).

Second, some years back, Luc — whose ancestry-search competence is vastly better than mine — helped me trace connections on my mother’s side and correct my misrecollections of several facts.

Third, Luc had gotten interested in the history of the Welsh language in Pennsylvania, which begins in colonial times, with late 17th-century negotiations over the Welsh Tract as a landmark event, and then apparently vanishes, leaving only place-names in its wake.

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Posted in German, History, Kinship, Memory, My life, Names, Welsh | 2 Comments »

In-laws and planetary mnemonics

December 3, 2023

My 11/17/23 posting “My in-law news from a month ago” opened with this photo:


(#1) My husband-equivalent Jacques Henry Transue, his mother Monique Serpette Transue, and his older brother Bill (William R.R. Transue) from about 50 years ago

I got the photo in e-mail on the birthday of Virginia Bobbitt Transue (Bill’s wife, and so my sister-in-law-in-law) on 10/12 — the day after Jacques’s and my wedding-equivalent anniversary, celebrated on National Coming Out Day, 10/11. I wrote then:

VT’s birthday took the family’s e-mail messages afield in a different direction, about, of all things, planetary mnemonics … In postings to come, I’ll use that birthday to introduce more about my in-law family, then later get into the planetary mnemonics.

This is those postings to come, in one big package.

(On VT’s being my husband(-equivalent)’s brother’s wife, hence technically my sister-in-law-in-law, see my 8/20/23 posting “Double in-laws”.)

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Posted in Kinship, Memory, My life, Names | 2 Comments »

My in-law news from a month ago

November 17, 2023

Taking off from Virginia Transue’s message on 10/12, about her having unearthed this photograph from about 50 years ago:


(#1) From left to right: Jacques Transue (my husband-equivalent); his mother Monique Serpette Transue; and VT’s husband, J’s older brother Bill (William R.R. Transue, to distinguish him from his father Bill, William R. Transue)

VT wrote:

Maine, but which summer??? No date on the back. Mid-seventies, certainly —- those good-looking fellas!

(Oh yes, good-looking, two hot guys, but in two different ways in the photo — Jacques looking open but intense, Bill looking amiable.) By “Maine”, VT refers to Machiasport ME, way way Down East, where the family long has had a summer compound, at which they sail, play tennis on their tennis court, bring friends, and enjoy each other’s company. That’s the Maine woods in the background in #1; the three Transues in the photo are facing Machias Bay, the Atlantic Ocean, and Canada.

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Posted in Family life, Kinship, My life | Leave a Comment »

Double in-laws

August 20, 2023

About Virginia Bobbitt Transue — born 10/12/40 (a month after me) — the wife of a brother (Bill) of my husband-equivalent (Jacques). More succinctly, my husband’s brother’s wife, in effect my sister-in-law-in-law. Or, putting it in more abstract terms, my spouse’s sib’s spouse, my sib-in-law-in-law.

Here we have the equivalence of X’S SPOUSE’S SIB’S SPOUSE to X’S SPOUSE’S SIB (my brother-in-law’s wife treated as my sister-in-law) — an equivalence not recognized by some people, while for other people, it’s routine. It’s the way things work for Virginia and me; I refer to her as my sister-in-law, she refers to me as her brother-in-law.

There are other equivalences. The point of all of them is not merely selecting simple terms: the equivalences express feelings of familial closeness, caring, and even responsibility; they are emotionally potent.

Another double in-law equivalence (distinct from the Arnold-Virginia relationship, though parallel to it): of X’S SIB’S SPOUSE’S SIB to X’S SIB’S SPOUSE, again in effect X’s sib-in-law-in-law. For example, Keene Daingerfield’s wife Elizabeth (Libby) Walcutt Daingerfield’s sister Ann Walcutt Winn’s husband Jack Winn — Keene’s sister-in-law’s husband — treated by Keene as his brother-in-law.

Now, the background to all of this. (Some of this will be a bit repetitious; I’m trying to pull out some really cool abstract distinctions that take a while to appreciate, because what we know about them is pretty much all below the level of our consciousness, and we don’t learn anything about kinship relations in school.)

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Posted in Kinship, Lexical semantics, My life, Opposition | 3 Comments »

Cory and Calvin, Kiefer and Petey

December 21, 2022

Today’s Christmas card material (hat tip to Aric Olnes): identical-twin muscle-hunk sex-elves in seasonal costume, with some cookie-eating oral action as a bonus:


Twins Cory and Calvin Boling: TikTok stars, bodybuilders, fitness models, and trainers; born 10/18/97 in North Carolina, they advertise themselves on Instagram and Facebook as well as TikTok

Yes, indisputably homoerotic; I imagine them pole-dancing.

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Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Kinship, Language and the body, Movies and tv, Music, Parody | Leave a Comment »

My sister-in-law’s birthday

October 23, 2022

Marriage with deceased wife’s sister is trivial, whatever vexations it might have presented to British light-opera law. I’m here to talk about birthday celebrations for deceased husband-equivalent’s deceased brother’s wife: Virginia Bobbitt Transue; of Auburn AL for most of the year, Machiasport ME during the summer; nurturer of chamber music in Auburn and of a family spread around the country;  energetic, enthusiastic, and charming friend of nearly five decades now; and a kid, a whole month younger than me (my birthday is 9/6), so that there’s a month in the fall when I am nominally a year older than she is (the scheme of reckoning ages in our culture has its goofy corners), but that this is righted on 10/12 — the day after NCOD, National Coming Out Day (which is a big thing in my world) — and she and I always take note of the event. 1940 rules!

That was, alas, 11 days ago ago — my life has been overfull with event and then I’ve been felled by sickness — but now I’m here to effervesce a little more about Virginia and then, in a second posting (to come  in a while) to go all social-sciency on you with observations about the (often covert) kinship categories in my sociocultural world and about the labels we use in English for the relationships in question, which enable me to talk about her as my sister-in-law — ‘the wife of the brother of my husband’ = ‘my husband’s brother’s wife’ — and her to talk about me as her brother-in-law — ‘the husband of the brother of her husband’ = ‘her husband’s brother’s husband’.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Kinship, My life | Leave a Comment »

Suspended Christmas

January 31, 2019

(Thanks to a cascade of medical conditions that began at the beginning of this month and has consumed much of my time, I’m still working my way through Christmas-oriented postings. Better late, as they say. [And yes, the back-truncation better late is in my files.])

The classic vehicle for carrying Christmas ornaments is the Christmas tree, an up-standing object. But suspended vehicles are also possible: hanging baskets, for instance, or this festive arrangement in Virginia Transue’s dining room that takes advantage of a chandelier:


(#1) Virginia’s 2018 smilax chandelier, with ornaments

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Posted in Holidays, Kinship, Language and plants, Names, Taxonomic vs. common, Truncation | 1 Comment »