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

[Bill Mullins]

>   I see this morning that "Yo' mama" occurs in Zora Neale Hurston's classic 1937 book Their Eyes Were Watching God.

I don't, from a quick CTRL-F of "mama", find any uses in this book that aren't simply eye-dialect for "your mother/mama".
And while I recall from school days hearing and saying "your/yo mama", I'm struggling to figure out what it would be about the phrase that suggests it deserves an entry in a dictionary.  Usage that I recall was always something like "Yo mama so fat, when she cuts her leg shaving, gravy runs out", or as a response:  someone says to you "You an ugly mf" and the reply would be "yo mama", where the implied meaning is "your mama is the ugly one".  In other words, I don't see any meaning beyond whatever the expression "your mother" would have, if it were substituted.

Also from 1937:  the novella "Big Boy Leaves Home" in Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children has the line "Yo mama don wear no drawers" (a bit of doggerel that is also in the ZNH book Fred cites).


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