Uncle Not Really, Auntie Hardly

no I didn't.

But my brother's kids do it all the time. Great-aunts, older cousins, church friends are all "Aunt so-so" and "Uncle Joe Blow" to them. Irritates me a bit as I'm their only true aunt (or uncle for that matter). So from the time they were tiny I requested to be called Tia. They may not understand the difference btw my cousin, "Uncle Jay", and myself being "Aunt" but I am the only person who is their tia.

I call Tia Maria the drink Auntie Mary. This confuses a lot of people.

But I was encouraged to do the auntie/uncle thing with people who I wasn't related to, e.g. next door neighbours, by my mother. My theory is that it provides a halfway house between using Mr or Mrs X which is considered too formal and 'John' or 'Mary' or whatever which is considered too informal!

I don't even call my real aunts (I have no surviving real uncles) Aunt or Auntie now. It just seems a weird thing for anyone over 18 to do.

I knew this was a MarkH thread.

I was shocked when I found out that my Aunt Alice and Uncle Cotton weren't actually related. It was weird, it definitely changed the way I felt about them. "Oh, they're not really aunt and uncle, they're just friends of parents."

Don't some East Asian cultures use "Uncle" as a general term of respect for non-related men? Or have I been misled by bad subtitles?

if the formality thing is correct then I suspect the practice is in decline. And anyway, ppl seem to associate it with the seventies coz on some retro Tv programme (possibly Life on Mars) or a trailer for it there is a reference to "back in the day when kids had uncles and aunts who weren't *real* uncles and aunts".

you may be right, Noodle, as I know the former UN Secretary General U Thant's first name means Uncle.

My two cousins were arguing about this, whether I should be Uncle Jordan or Cousin Jordan to their respective kids. One thought uncle was a little more intimate and also implies seniority, and the other was all no he is a cousin therefore not an uncle.

Where I grew up, kids addressed unrelated adults with Mr. Firstname or Miss Firstname. So I would be Miss Jenny, MarkH would be Mr. Mark, etc. Aunt and uncle was reserved for the siblings of your parents or grandparents.

All my neighbours were Uncle or Auntie when I was a kid. I suspect this also breaks down on class lines.

No, we were never encouraged to call unrelated people "aunt" or "uncle" - depending on their generation/intimacy with my parents/hippiness we would either call them Mr. Friend or John and Jane. (Most of my parents' friends were hippies who encouraged kids to use their first names.)

Only related people were Aunt and Uncle, and often this used family nicknames rather than their actual name - sometimes they even got epithets, if they were on the "wrong side" of the family. It was kind of interesting having, like "Wicked Uncle A*******" brought up in conversation. (I suppose this was to diferentiate him from all the other Alastairs in the family. Similarly we had Grandpa Hamish to distinguish from my brother Hamish, and Grannie and the Auldie Grannie - my mum's mum was Granny, but my dad's mum was Granny and her name) But cousins are just known by their first name, no matter how distant or close.

Oh, that was dumb. I asterixed out the one use of the name, but not the other. Oh well, he's dead, it's not like he's going to google himself.

they have google in heaven, Kate.

Well, in that case: Dear Wicked Uncle A - go FUCK YOURSELF with a running chainsaw.

But they censor out the swears in Heaven.

thunderbolt for Ms St Claire!

(good thing the Almighty's a tad deaf)

Oh wait, HEAVEN, never mind, nothing to worry about. In the Other Place, clearly they still use Alta Vista.

and they have special asbestos laptops that don't get melted by the infernal fire.

No they don't, they have 'puters that keep melting and then you have to ring tech support and be put on hold for hours at a time before someone tells you what bugfix to install to stop the melting, but then that only makes things go worse...

We were never even encouraged to call our actual aunts and uncles "Aunty" or "Uncle". Just their first names. We might say it when talking about them, to differentiate them from other people with those names, but never to them. My mother hates it when my cousins say "Aunty Jill". "I'm just Jill," she will correct them.

Having your kids call someone "uncle" or "aunt" is just an easy non-taxing way to say "you're practically family to me." I think originally this got done with people who genuinely were involved in your everyday life to a family-like extent, but then somewhere along the line it became one of those social things, where you have to tell people they're honorary uncles so they don't feel bad.

Also it's convenient cause once your kids address someone like this, they're suddenly responsible for babysitting sometimes, and they can't get out of coming to your place for dinner.

Going back: I think a lot of words from other cultures get translated as kids calling everyone "uncle" or whatever, but the word in question means something more like "respected familial-type elder."

Plus in places with close extended families, there's a tendency for a hundred people a generation up from you to just be some vague type of "aunt" or "uncle," just like eight hundred people roughly your age, however complexly or distantly related, collapse into the category of "cousin."