mummy

   A word used by young children to their mother. Boys usually stop using this form by the age of twelve or so, though usage varies with each family. Girls, especially middle-class girls, are likely to continue using it much longer. Examples of usage occur, e.g., in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, by Angus Wilson; The Half Hunter, by John Sherwood; The Limits of Love, by Frederic Raphael; The Liberty Man, by Gillian Freeman; Unconditional Surrender, by Evelyn Waugh; Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry. The word is sometimes extended to ‘Mummykins’, ‘Mummy dear’, ‘Mummy pet’, etc. Rudyard Kipling’s story The Gardener is about a boy being brought up by a woman he calls Auntie. He asks why he can’t call her Mummy. She says he might do so ‘at bed-time, for a pet-name between themselves’. The end of the story reveals that she is his true mother anyway.

   The Actor, by Horace Annesley Vachell, has a woman saying to a man: ‘You are such a baby.’ This causes him to make fun of her by calling her Mummy Mirabel (her name). ‘Rummy mummy I am.’ she comments. There is another instance of this assumed maternal role in Georgy Girl, by Margaret Forster. Two young women friends have just come in from the rain. ‘I’ve made a mess,’ one of them says. ‘You have that/ says the other, ‘go and take your mac off at once, do you hear?’ ‘Yes, mummy,’ says her friend, obediently. The variant spelling ‘Mumee’ occurs in Thursday Afternoons, by Monica Dickens, indicating the exasperated pronunciation of the word by an adolescent girl.