expertlinguist
Motorcycling hoodlum
- Joined
 - Jan 30, 2004
 
- Posts
 - 4,073
 
Confirmation that the saying "one can't choose one's family, but one can choose one's friends" is valid.The European royal families were so intermarried at one point--most of them coming from the Austrian Hapsburg line--that there were common birth defects among them. One of the most notable was the Haspsburg chin. King Charles II of Spain was almost a complete idiot due to all the inbreeding that had happened.
More recently, of all the major nations involved in World War I--England, Germany and Russia--the kings of those three countries were first cousins, and had grown up together.