ma

   A short form of ‘Mama’ or ‘Mamma’, normally addressed to the speaker’s mother. Usage began in the early nineteenth century, but the Oxford English Dictionary is able to cite evidence that it was considered a vulgarity and laughed at by the educated. In The Newcomes, by William Thackeray, Julia Sherrick addresses her mother as ‘Ma’, while remonstrating with her for addressing Mr Honeyman as ‘Mr H.’ Both of these vocative usages would have accurately placed the family for nineteenth-century readers. ‘Ma’ continues to be used in individual families. There are eleven examples in Absolute Beginners, by Colin MacInnes, and a further seven in William Golding’s Free Fall, all addressed to the speaker’s mother. In A Fairy Tale of New York, by J.P.Donleavy, there is a nonfamily use by a cab-driver to a woman who lets rooms. He introduces a young man to her by saying: ‘He’s all right. Ma, just back from college over in Europe.’ When a similar thing happens in South Riding, by Winifred Holtby, the hearer takes it as an insult: ‘He called her “Ma”. She felt the insult to her wasted youth, her faded prettiness. Well - she was a Ma, wasn’t she?’ The most interesting comment on the normal family use of the word comes in The Diviners, by the Canadian writer Margaret Laurence. Miss Laurence has much to say on the vocative usage of her characters, and is clearly keenly aware of subtleties of usage.

   ‘Hi, Ma,’ Pique says. This Ma bit is new. It is as though Pique, at fifteen, has now decided that Mum sounds too childish and Mother, possibly, too formal. The word in some way is a proclamation of independence, a statement of the fact that the distance between them, in terms of equality, is diminishing, and the relationship must soon become that of two adults.