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…
When I was a teenager, my dad and I would play slow chess. His job involved regularly rotating shift work, which meant that we often went weeks at a time where our days didn’t really overlap. So, to stay connected, we kept a chess board in the kitchen. Every day, Dad would make a move on the board while eating after he got home, and I would make mine after school. It was a fun way to stay connected when our lives were otherwise out of sync.
We didn’t know it at the time, but we were also inventing what would become an important ritual between us.
