Their familial relationships were exceedingly strange. Indeed, since everyone was related to everyone else, we found that no one was either father or mother, brother or sister, uncle or aunt, cousin or nephew, son-in-law or daughter-in-law, godfather or godmother, or anything else. Except that I saw one very old man, who had no nose, call a little girl of three or four “my father”, and the little girl call him “my daughter”.
Their relationships were such that I heard a man call a woman “my beanpole”, and the woman call him “my porpoise”…
This is the map of the world from France in the 12th century.
Courtesy: Wellcome Library, London
Walking past, I saw a rake who, greeting a woman, called her “my mattress”. She answered, “my quilt”. And indeed, he looked a lot like a good thick quilt. One called a woman “my crumb”, and she called him “my crust”. Another man addressed a woman as his fence post, and she called him her poker.
One called a woman “my good old shoe”, and she called him slipper. Another called a woman his high-heeled boot, and she called him her sandal. One called a woman his mitten, and she called him her glove. One called a woman his pork rind, and she called him her bacon – and they were like a bacon and rind to each other. So, too, one of them called a woman “my omelette”, and she called him “my egg” – and they were every bit as close as eggs in an omelette.
Haeckel
was a German supporter of the English Victorian scientist Charles Darwin
who most famously worked out the theory of natural evolution. Haeckel's
Illustrations of Darwin's theories uses the traditional idea of the family
tree to show the controversial idea that humans are descended from apes
and related to sea-squirts and egg-animals.
Ernst Haeckel, ‘The Pedigree of Man’, Evolution of Man, 1866
In the same way, one of them called a woman “my bundle”, and she called him “my stick”. But you couldn’t for the life of you figure out what kinship, or relationship, or connection, or degree of bloodline lineage they had, according to our way of looking at things, except that someone told us he was a stick from her bundle.
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, circa 1534-1554