Re: Brothers-in-law

Tristan Alexander McLeay wrote:
> Well, there's also defacto in-laws. And even someone who's not in a
> defacto relationship but just has a boy-/girlfriend will describe
> their other's parents as in-laws so to me it is a nice example of
> fossilisation & semantic drift.
>
> For that matter I think at least in (some states of?) Australia,
> "defacto" relationships have some sort of recognition in law so
> they're not really "de facto" relationships. I love it when semantic
> drift does these things, and this seems to be a domain in which they'd
> be very common.
Some US states have a similar status, known as "Common law marriages",
though, most states have since repealed common-law marriage laws
(though, of course, relationships that qualified as common-law marriages
prior to the repeal generally retain that status)

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