|About Us | What's New | Search | Site Map | Contact Us|
momism (MOM-iz-ehm) noun
1. Excessive attachment towards one's mother.
2. Excessive mothering; overprotection.
[Coined by author Philip Wylie (1902-1971).]
"I, who grew up as a 'motherless' minister's son and hence was smothered
in multimomism for a decade and a half, had an unusual opportunity to
observe the phenomenon at zero range."
"Rhona arrives home with a load of guilt and dirty laundry. The first
act consists mostly of Rhona trying to break through her parent's
impenetrable wall of momism. Rhona blunders about in her mother's
well-ordered life trying desperately to find out why she never grew
If you move a meeting forward, what would you call it? How does "prepone" (an opposite of postpone) sound? The word makes perfect sense and fills a need. It's listed in many dictionaries including the OED (Oxford English Dictionary). But for some reason it has not caught on outside India where it happens to be an everyday word. I wonder why.
Necessity is the mother of invention, they say, and that's one of the ways new words are coined in the language. In fact, all words are coined words. Someone used them for the first time, in writing or speech, and thus gave birth to them. This week's we'll look at words coined by known authors.
We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books. -Robert M. Hutchins, educator (1899-1977)