A Doonesbury cartoon reprinted in Doonesbury Dossier: The Reagan Years (1984):
Reproduced here without political comment. But one brief linguistic note.
Ronald Reagan famously addressed his wife Nancy as Mommy — a well-attested usage in which one parent addresses the other by a term their children use. From OED3 (Dec. 2002) on this use of mother:
colloq. and regional. Used by a father to address or refer to the mother of his children. [first cite 1855 Dickens Little Dorrit]
The entry offers examples from husband to wife and vice versa:
1970 P. Carlon Souvenir: Don’t you loathe the way old folks call each other Mother and Dad?
2008 D. Sharp Mama does Time: ‘I’ll be back for you in a couple of hours, Mother.’ ‘I’ll be right here, Father.’
The usage is not only colloquial and regional, but also, I think, age-graded (I don’t think it’s ever been used by young parents to one another), now rather old-fashioned, and class-marked (rarely used by upper-middle-class and upper-class speakers).
April 8, 2017 at 4:56 am |
From Luc Baronian on Facebook:
Ah, a creative use of the conventions.