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Incidentally your suggestion of "Gaia, the mother of all plants" is hardly an illustration of the quotation. And if "plants" is a typo for "planets" that would be absurd.
It was an off-the-cuff example of the use of the phrase where size was not the issue, while parenthood was. It was not intended to be an authoritative quote from anywhere.
Personally, I think the suggestion that it necessarily comes from the Arabic is off-base, but I can't find any support in my references - for or against.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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assuming the two expressions are separate, two separate lines of inquiry came to mind, which I'll express in two separate posts for the convenience of those who use threaded mode:
1) We've been talking about "the mother of all __".
But where does "a mother of a __" from?
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and
2) Re the speculation that "the mother of all __" might be an idiom of some non-english language, and came to our attention when used by a national leader to whom that tongue was native.
Any other cases where troubles developed because political leader used an idiom, from his language, that was trannslated into english? I'm thinking of Khruschev's, "We will bury you!" Any others?
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And, while we're at it, where did "Ma, they're pickin' on me!" come from? Just asking, like.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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...and how about "no good will come of this"?
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Guys, it's a legitimate question of "words as communication/miscommunication".
But I'd expected that question #1 would have provoked the greater response. On that:
My understanding is that "a mother of a __" and mother-f*cker come from US negro slang. Prompting this question: are those phrases commonly used outside the US?
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>Guys, it's a legitimate question
guise it any way you like, it's still coarse slang (and had nothing at all to do with my question) -- I got a start when I looked in OED and found the ppl. form equated to the British slang word 'bloody'.
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stranger
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I think there is a problem here, that things that happened before the internet became extraorinarily popular in the early 1990s, tend to seem like they never happened. In particular, since we can search for usage after 1995 a lot easier than before, we have a tendency to think that the phrase "mother of all" was never used prior to Saddam Hussein's usage before the first Gulf War. But I remember that phrase very well - I knew what it meant before Saddam used it, "mother of all cookies" meant "a huge cookie". And I was raised in the U.S. And that's what I thought when "When the battle becomes a comprehensive one with all types of weapons, the deaths on the allied side will be increased with God's help. When the deaths and the dead mount on them, the infidels will leave and the flag of Alluhu Akbar will fly over the Mother of all Battles." - Saddam Hussein, Baghdad Radio, 20 January 1991 What particularly stuck in my mind, however, was a commentary I read (or heard? or watched?) back in '91 that said the conmmon American usage of that term was NOT, in fact, what Saddam meant. That commentary claimed that Saddam thought the war was literally a mother - that it would give birth to countless other wars later on. And arguably he was correct. Since the internet prior to Saddam's usage was so small, it's not a good place to look. However, Google Books has a great thing called the Ngram Viewer which shed some light on this. Go to https://books.google.com/ngrams and type in "mother of all" and you'll find it's not a terribly popular phrase, but its usage increased quite a bit in 1990. The kindred phrase "father of all" was similar in popularity, but did not get a spike in 1990.
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WELCOME,Jorg
This thread is 13 years old, find a newer one and join us. However
you may resurrect it with your good post. Hope so, at any rate good
to have you here.
----please, draw me a sheep----
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newbie
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newbie
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The creator of course. And look where this has led...MOAB. Mother of all bombs. Alpha-Omega. BYOB to the apocalypse.
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