[Ads-l] "Hotel Mama" -- not in OED or UrbanDictionary.

Joel Berson berson at ATT.NET
Sat Jul 11 17:12:49 UTC 2015


Reported by a friend as spoken to her.


Googling, I noticed a DE Wikipedia article "Hotel Mama", and correlated that with the fact that  the speaker is a native German working in the U.S.  Freely and likely poorly translating from the DE Wikipedia article:

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Hotel Mama is an ironic colloquial term for a family home in which adults, called “nest potatoes”* or “residers with one’s mom”, still live in their parents' homes after  the end of adolescence.
 
 
The term refers to the traditional social roles, such as cooking or cleaning, which in the typical household are still attributed to the mother.  The expression "altricial" phenomenon also arose.  The theme of the nest-potato was also the subject of a TV series called “Hotel Mama”, by Christos Yiannopoulos, which was broadcast by ZDF.
 
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* Auf Deutsch “Nesthocker”.  I prefer my colloquial rendering, modeled after "couch potato",to Google Translates’ pretentious “altricials”; and GTranslate actually offers "potato" for Hocker".


Now for English.  Many risky sites and irrelevant Ghits, including for commercial "Hotel Mamma"s presumably so-called to suggest they are as welcoming and comfortable as home.  I did not make an extensive search, and stopped with the following single quotation:
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But that’s nothing. In Slovakia, 74 percent of adults 18 to 34 years old -- regardless of employment or marital status -- still live with their parents, European Commission statistics show.


And among older adults -- those 25 to 34 -- 57 percent reside at what is referred to here as “Hotel Mama.”


[The New York Times, APRIL 20, 2015, "Empty Nest? In Slovakia, It May Begin When the Child Is 35", by RICK LYMAN.  Google "hotel mama".]

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Joel

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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