You wouldn’t reckon that a day set aside to celebrate female parents would be so packed with controversy.
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While thousands of us will be fun running – as if that’s even possible – or walking in the annual Mother’s Day Classic at Beischer Park in Strathdale, they should know they are at the comfy end of at least a century of confusion.
This year, it’s been exacerbated by the Pope himself.
Pope Francis took an uncharacteristic swipe at the Americans for naming its latest huge bomb “the Mother of All Bombs.”
It was insulting to mothers generally, he felt.
Sadly, it wasn’t the actual name of the bomb.
It’s GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast. Its nickname was Mother Of All Bombs.
Massive Ordnance Air Blast might well describe some mums. But we won’t mention them.
The MOAB is just a bit bigger than the one it replaced, the BLU-82, which some nicknamed the Daisy Cutter.
It probably upset florists everywhere.
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“Mother” has always been a loaded word.
Even in its Mother’s Day context. Where the heck do you put the apostrophe? Before or after the S? Is it just one mother’s day, or every mothers’ day?
Curiously, that argument was solved right at the start in 1908 when Anna Jarvis held a memorial service for her Mum at a church in West Virginia. The idea took off and four years later she trademarked the words “Mother’s Day” and said it honoured each person’s own mother, not all mothers.
Curiously, this flashed into a controversial world row over the next decade as Jarvis fumed at the commercialisation of the event and took out legal writs to get its card-saturated, dollar-generating cheesiness stopped.
She lost. She was arrested for disturbing the peace.
In Australia, we have Janet Heyden, of Leichardt, in Sydney to thank for Mother’s Day. In 1925, she organised some local school kids and businesses to make and donate gifts for sad mums at the Newington State Home for Women also known as the Newington State Hospital for Infirm and Destitute Women.
We think we like our MD origin better.
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You might think that it’s only in this vulgar and nasty world that some have turned “mother” into a swear word.
Nope. In this trashy context, its use has been noted as far back as 1889 when it popped up as a curse which had offended a chap in Texas. Even though that’s 128 years ago, it is still too grubby to appear in a daily newspaper.
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We’ve been sent a photograph of something one of our chums saw in their local laundromat this week.
It’s of a large washer/dryer.
Above it is a sign: “Pets/mats machine”.
Just the thing for re-foofing your feline.