MOTHER

Use this forum to discuss past Good Words.
User avatar
Dr. Goodword
Site Admin
Posts: 7417
Joined: Wed Feb 02, 2005 9:28 am
Location: Lewisburg, PA
Contact:

MOTHER

Postby Dr. Goodword » Sat May 12, 2007 11:25 pm

• mother •

Pronunciation: mê-dhêr • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: The female parent, a woman who bears and/or primarily raises a child.

Notes: Even the word mother has born a large and happy family of Germanic offspring. The adjective and adverb of this noun is motherly which has a noun, motherliness, that expresses the affection and nurturing of good mothers. The status of being a mother is, of course, motherhood. The new term for "baby talk" is motherese since we discovered that it is an affectation of mothers and not childish speech. Just as mothers often must handle two jobs, so does today's Good Word, which doubles as a verb: "She mothers him too much", means that she is too attentive.

In Play: Mothers are the central part of our lives and often of other things as well: the central part of a computer is the motherboard and Mother Earth and Mother Nature completely enfold us. The mother of all sales would be the biggest imaginable sale and the one imitated by all others. Our mothers are the critical part of our lives and of things that are bigger than life.

Word History: It is most appropriate that the word for "mother" in Proto-Indo-European originated in the first recognizable syllable uttered by babies: ma. This syllable was attached to a kinship suffix, -ter, which also turns up in brother, father, and sister. The original form, mater-, later evolved into the current words for "mother" we now find in all the Indo-European languages: Latin mater, Greek meter (as in metropolis, the mother city), German Mutter, French mère, Serbian majka, Russian mat', materi, Italian and Spanish madre, Portuguese mãe, Danish moder, Dutch and Afrikaans moeder, Norwegian mor, Swedish moder, Icelandic móðir, Irish máthair, Hindi mataji, Gujarati maataa, Farsi (Persian) madar, and Pashto mor. If you are a mother, may this day be as beautiful and exciting as all these languages.
• The Good Dr. Goodword

Perry
Great Grand Panjandrum
Posts: 2306
Joined: Wed Mar 29, 2006 9:50 am
Location: Asheville, NC

Postby Perry » Sun May 13, 2007 8:25 pm

And in Hebrew ima (אמא).
"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once. Lately it hasn't been working."
Anonymous

Stargzer
Great Grand Panjandrum
Posts: 2578
Joined: Tue Feb 15, 2005 3:56 pm
Location: Crownsville, MD

Postby Stargzer » Mon May 14, 2007 1:11 am

It's too late to check with the family expert on early childhood development (she goes to sleep much earlier than I do), but I seem to recall somewhere that, much to the chagrin of those that bore them, most babies utter "Da" and "Da-da" as their first recognizable sounds. No one ever said Life, or Parenthood, is fair. :wink:
Regards//Larry

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
-- Attributed to Richard Henry Lee


Return to “Good Word Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Amazon [Bot] and 54 guests