mater

   The Latin word for ‘mother’, which public schoolboys began to use in direct address to their mothers in the mid-nineteenth century in Britain. Possibly the term was a useful compromise, as Margaret Laurence says of Ma (see also Ma). ‘You shall have a copy the moment it is published, mater, and read the thing,’ says a son in Cynthia, by Leonard Merrick. ‘I do wish he’d call me “mamma”,’ says the mother concerned. ‘He makes me feel a hundred years old.’ This is slightly puzzling; it is difficult to see how ‘mater’ is more aging than ‘mamma’. There is a discussion of the use of ‘Mater’ in The Last and the First, by Ivy Compton-Burnett, the speakers being as precise as Miss Burnett’s characters always are:

   ‘You all call me Mater now,’ said Eliza with a frown. ‘The name was chosen for Hermia and Madeline, because they remembered their own mother. There is no point in it for anyone else.’ ‘But it is better not to have two names,’ said Madeline. ‘And Mater has the maternal implication, and yet seems to avoid the deeper one.’

   This is yet another suggestion for dealing with the step-mother problem.