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

[Shapiro, Fred]

When I mentioned "yo' mama" to "Skip" Gates (chief editor of an important forthcoming dictionary) as a potential entry in his dictionary, he thought that was a great idea and regarded the song quoted in "Their Eyes Were Watching God" as an illustration of that lexeme.  A phrase consisting of a pronoun and a noun is not a common type of lexeme in a dictionary, but I expect other such lexemes could be found in the OED.

I am going to take a look at my library's copy of Elijah Wood's book, "The Dozens," to see what Wood's earliest "yo' mama" example is.  Maybe it will be Speckled Red's boogie piano recording of "The Dirty Dozen" in 1929:
Yonder go your mama going out across the field
Running and shaking like an automobile
I hollered at your mama and I told her to wait
She slipped away from me like a Cadillac Eight
Now she’s a running mistreater, robber and a cheater
Pappy is your cousin, slip you in the dozen
Your mama do the lordy-lord
I don't mean to be dismissive of Bill's point, Bill is one of the people whose opinions I value most highly and everything he says is insightful.
Fred Shapiro

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From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Bill Mullins <amcombill at HOTMAIL.COM>
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2026 8:24 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: More on "Your Mama" Not in OED

>   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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