[Ads-l] "Your Mama" Not in OED

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Excellent work, Fred, Ben, and LH. An important scholarly article
about the dozens appeared in 1939. The phrase "your mother / ma" was
mentioned as a challenge phrase.

Date: 1939 November
Periodical: The American Imago: The Psychoanalytic Journal for the Art
and Sciences
Volume 1, Number 1
Article: The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult
Author: John Dollard (Institute of Human Relations Yale University)
Start Page 3, End Page 25, Quote Page 17
Publisher: Dr Hanns Sachs, Boston, Massachusetts
Database: Internet Archive

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26301143

[Begin excerpt]
There is another scrap of evidence with regard to a northern city. An
upper-class Negro woman said the pattern existed in her high school
group in the following form: a simple reference to "your ma" or "your
mother" was a fighting challenge. The woman herself did not know why
one had to fight when she heard this but did know that fight one must.
Perhaps the repressive influence of class and school had elided from
expression the rest of the Dozens pattern, and we have in the
condensed expression a sort of stump of the full behavior structure.
[End excerpt]

The following fragments occurred in the article within insults or
descriptions of insults:
your mammy
your mother
your ma
your mama

Garson

On Sun, Mar 15, 2026 at 11:43 PM Ben Zimmer
<00001aae0710f4b7-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:
>
> Here's Langston Hughes in 1948.
>
> ---
> Chicago Defender, July 24, 1948, p. 14, col. 7 [ProQuest]
> Langston Hughes, "Here to Yonder: Those Little Things"
> I wonder if, when the Kinsey Report gets around to Negroes, it will take up
> the subject of "the dozens" -- that fabulous game few whites seem to
> comprehend, even on the simplest level. I one knew a colored chauffeur who
> told me that one morning he had used his people's car to do a little
> shopping on his own, since the boss was not going out until noon. The
> chauffeur forgot to remove some of his parcels from the back seat where he
> had placed them as the dog had been riding in front.
> At noon when the boss emerged from the house to get in the car, he demanded
> in a rather sharp tone, "Whose things are these on the back seat here?"
> The way he spoke made the Negro mad. So, feeling evil anyhow, the chauffeur
> replied, "Your mama's."
> "Not at all," said the white man. "Mother has not been out this morning."
> Fortunately, a complete lack of understanding of the little nuances
> involved prevented the chauffeur from getting fired.
> ---
>
> On Sun, Mar 15, 2026 at 7:06 PM Shapiro, Fred <
> 00001ac016895344-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:
>
> > Could be, but I wasn't able to find any in an hour of research.
> > Newspapers and books may have considered those spellings to be too informal
> > to print.
> >
> > Fred Shapiro

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