2023 Scientific American, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc. And I'm not talking peck on the lips, I'm talking make out kinda stuff. Orig. In none of this usage is there a hint of "kissing cousins" being used to refer to relatives who can kiss without taboo because they are distantly enough related that marriage is legally available to them. Inbreeding may help explain why insects can develop resistance almost overnight to pesticides like DDT: The resistance first shows up as a recessive trait in one obscure family line. Illinois. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both said "I do" to their third cousins. Pierre-Samuel du Pont, founder of an American dynasty that believed in inbreeding, hinted at these factors when he told his family: "The marriages that I should prefer for our colony would be between the cousins. North Carolina prohibits marriage only for double first cousins. Mitch makes a perfect point. One unlucky woman, whom Robin Bennett encountered in the course of her research, recalled the reaction when she became pregnant after living with her first cousin for two years. How did Rothschilds or Darwins manage to marry their cousins with apparent impunity? 19,372. AncestryDNA can match you with your cousins with a high degree of accuracy with a simple DNA test. Second, cousin marriages make it more likely that spouses will be compatible, particularly in an alien environment. Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. I kissed my cousin when I was 11 and he was 19 and I really liked it. It is, of course, a long way from sockeye salmon and inbred insects to human mating behavior. Most of the answers have described it as either close enough that a platonic kiss is proper, or distantly related enough that a romantic kiss is proper. God bless her! (Moreover, all three could be read in any way: as HL suggest, as I suggest or as you suggest.) As a matter of fact, if the example of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah is any indication, it would appear that cousin marriage was fairly common in the ancient world. You're probably most familiar with your first cousins the children of your parents' siblings. The two 1859 instances refer to the Virginia custom of kissing one's cousins, which (I infer) led to the term "kissing cousin" as used in the 1917 citation (the date for which I unfortunately omitted until now). He's in his early 20s, I'm in my early 30s. When we got our clothes off he took me from behind pushing me on the bed spreading my . Until the past century, families tended to remain in the same area for generations, and men typically went courting no more than about five miles from homethe distance they could walk out and back on their day off from work. But he says that the lips of a pretty cousin are a sort of neutral ground, between a sister's and a stranger's. Clearly it isn't in the UK, but you're not the only English speakers in the world! Urban Dictionary: kissing cousin Such marriages may be even more attractive for Pakistanis in Bradford, England, than back home in Kashmir. Data is unavailable for white countries. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'kissing cousin.' The new study, however, was able to shed light on the biological reason for the earlier findings.

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