mum

   Used in Britain to address the speaker’s mother, usually when the speaker is a child. Many adults continue to use the term, especially if they are members of a working or lower middle-class family. The normal American equivalent is ‘Mom’. In individual families the use of ‘Mum’ may be extended to a mother-in-law or a step-mother. It is thought that both ‘Mum’ and ‘Mom’ ultimately derive from a sound naturally made by infants as they begin to speak, a sound which could equally well be written as ‘Mam’. The words for ‘mother’ in many different languages seem to have been based on this sound. The written form ‘Mum’ is only recorded from the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it was probably in dialectal use. at least, long before that. In the nineteenth century some confusion was caused by the fact that ‘mum’ represented a vulgar pronunciation of ‘madam’. Thus in Vanity Fair, by William Thackeray, we find:

   Miss Horrocks was installed as housekeeper at Queen’s Crawley, and ruled all the domestics there with great majesty and rigour. All the servants were instructed to address her as ‘Mum’ or ‘Madam’; and there was one little maid, on her promotion, who persisted in calling her ‘My Lady’ without any rebuke on the part of the housekeeper.

   Tom Sharpe, in Ancestral Vices, has: ‘“And don’t call me mum, girl,” said Emmelia. “I am not your mum.” “No, mum.”’ In Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore a London railway porter asks a middleclass woman: ‘Where do you want to go, mum?’ The novel is set in the 1940s. Such usage would rarely be heard in modern times, though the family use of ‘Mum’ continues. Its association with childhood can mean that there comes a point where a speaker wishes to change to the more adult ‘Mother’. In Arthur, Gordon McGill indicates one way of doing it:

   ‘Dear Mother’ was quite a breakthrough. I wrote ‘Dear Mother’ the first time when I was twenty-one, after years of ‘Dear Mum’. I suppose it was a bit cowardly to make the change in writing, but I couldn’t have said ‘Mother’ to her face one day out of the blue. She wouldn’t let me call her ‘Ma’ or ‘Maw’ like all the other kids in the street did. I think she really wanted it to be ‘Mummy’, but I wasn’t going to stand for that. I vaguely remember, at four, putting my small foot down at ‘Mummy’.