mavourneen

   From the Irish mo mhurnin, ‘my darling’. It is used by an Englishman to an Irish woman in The Sleepers of Erin, by Jonathan Gash. Her response is to tell him: ‘And you can stop that.’ One would normally expect this vocative to be used by an Irish speaker.

   Maw A spelling of ‘Ma’, indicating a dialectal or sub-standard pronunciation of that word. St Urbain’s Horseman, by Mordecai Richler, has: ‘Things have improved, Maw. I mean these days you can actually plead not guilty.’ The speaker is Jewish Canadian in this case. In A Woman Called Fancy, by Frank Yerby, a girl from the hill country of Carolina uses ‘Maw’ to address her mother. The Taste of Too Much, by Clifford Hanley, has seven examples of its use in a Glasgow family.