2025-06-30
(Mod: 2025-09-14)
| 3 minutes
Your grandmother and grandfather are your grandparents. Your son and daughter are your children. Your brother and sister are your siblings. But when it comes to uncles and aunts, English gives us no genderless term that includes both.
The closest we’ve got, is an ugly, hatchet-faced word, made by collapsing “parent’s sibling” into… (Wait for it…)
“Pibling.”
Quite frankly, “pibling” sucks. But I’ve got an idea…
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In English, the -ling suffix is one that denotes immaturity or ineffectiveness. Consider ducklings, underlings, and weaklings, etc. Who would want to be associated with such lightweights and underachievers?
By linguistic association, the word “pibling” directly undermines the respectable mentorship role that is traditionally played by a parent’s siblings. I think this is why it meets such resistance. Subconsciously, we can all hear that it just sounds wrong. Vaguely infantalizing or insulting.
But somehow, it’s still the best term we’ve come up with, judging by how often it gets proposed. Yet even then, such proposals usually include a shrug and an apology that there isn’t a better word.
I won’t itemize the other frankenterms that have been suggested. They’re considerably worse. Most are either a variation on “uncle” or “aunt,” or an attempt to bolt those two words together at the neck. But invariably, they end up either feeling strongly influenced by the gender of the root word, clumsy on the tongue, or are impossible to distinguish from one of the other terms. Some even check all three boxes. (I’m looking at you, “auncle”.)
But what if there was a mechanism we’ve overlooked? Something that already exists in the English-language system for labeling family relationships. Something that is already gender neutral and is just sitting there waiting to be adapted. And what if that adaptation could be done using its own already-established rules?
Sounds too good to be true, right? If it’s that easy, why hasn’t somebody already proposed it? Well, maybe it’s because this requires us to think upside down for a moment. Let me explain.
We all know that the children of your uncles and aunts are your first cousins, right? Not everybody knows the next part, but your Great Aunt Tilly will tell you that moving down the family tree from there, the children of your first cousins are your second cousins, and their kids are your third cousins, etc.
But let’s rewind the tape. What if we went backward? What if we extended this logic up the tree instead of down? Couldn’t the parents of your first cousins also be called your zeroth cousins? Logically, that makes complete sense, but it is a mouthful to say.
So let’s shorten it to “zeeco.”
Since a zeeco is a kind of cousin, it’s already technically genderless, but perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t feel gendered. Your zeeco could be a man, or a woman, gay, straight, or nonbinary. Zeeco doesn’t feel coded for gender at all.
It feels playful, the way aunts and uncles often are, yet it doesn’t diminish the relationship in the process. There’s no “-ling”-factor here.
Listen to the kids: “I’m going to visit my zeeco this weekend!”
That sounds perfectly natural to my ear. I would be proud to be called Zeeco Jeff by my brother’s and sister’s kids.
In fact, it kinda feels fun. Almost like “uncle” and “aunt” are just technical designations, but you know you’ve really made a bond when the kids start calling you Zeeco.
And wouldn’t that be cool? If the genderless term became the sought-after term? The label of ultimate achievement in the lexicon of family affiliations?
I’m not just their uncle - I’m their zeeco.
Damn! I’d even put that shit on my resumé.
