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Mommick / Mammock

Dear Word Detective: I grew up in eastern North Carolina. When talking to us kids, my parents frequently used the word “mommick” (meaning “to ruin,” mess up, or shred like a cat on draperies). “Stop fighting! You’re mommicking my new sofa!” I’ve never heard the word anywhere else but have always thought it useful when speaking to dogs or children. Even people who’ve never heard the word before seem to know what it means. Is it a regional word? What’s the origin? — Donna Furman.

Eastern North Carolina? Just for fun, you should tell people you’re from Southern Eastern North Carolina. Then, while they’re trying to picture how that would possibly work, you can go through their pockets. It must be nice to come from somewhere where folks use colorful dialectical terms. Where I grew up, in suburban Connecticut fifty miles from New York City, we just said “mess up” or “tear up” in such cases. Every so often my mother would use a term she’d acquired in her childhood in Ohio (such as “scunner” for “grudge,” actually a Scots dialect word). But, for the most part, if you’ve seen “Leave It to Beaver,” you’ve seen (and heard) my childhood.

So I had never encountered “mommick,” and when I popped it into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), I discovered a number of interesting things. First off, the OED directs you from “mommick” to “mammock,” of which “mommick” is considered one of several forms (including “mommock,” “mummuck,” and “mammick”). The OED defines “mammock” as a verb to mean “to break, cut, or tear into fragments or shreds,” and as a noun to mean “a scrap or shred, a broken or torn piece.” The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) notes that use of the term in the US is primarily in the South, where as a noun it can also mean “a mess” and, as a verb, “to beat up.”

According to the OED, “mammock” first appeared as a noun in the early 16th century with the sense of “broken or torn piece” (“Whan mammockes was your meate, With moldy brede to eate,” circa 1529). The verb showed up about a century later, first found around 1616, in Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus (“Hee did so set his teeth, and teare it. Oh, I warrant how he mammockt it.”). Both those early examples refer to eating, and the OED offers the logical suggestion that “mammock” was onomatopoeic or “echoic” in origin, intended to mimic the sound of someone chewing something quite energetically and thoroughly. The “break, tear or mess up” senses of the verb would then be a natural extension of that literal “chew into pieces” definition.

Interestingly, the OED, in its etymological note for “mammock” as a noun, refers to the earlier English Dialect Dictionary, which, in addition to defining it as “a broken piece” or “a mess,” offers the definition “a scarecrow; a ‘guy'; an untidily or absurdly dressed person.” (The “guy” meant is an antiquated British term for a dummy or effigy, drawn from the name of Guy Fawkes, effigies of whom are still burned on Guy Fawkes Day. Google “gunpowder plot” for the details. And yes, that’s the same “guy” we use today to mean “fellow.”)

That leap from the “shred, small piece” sense of “mammock” to a meaning of “scarecrow, weird-looking person” is difficult to explain, but I have a theory. I suspect that “mammock” when used in the “scarecrow” sense is actually a completely different word, a variant of “mammet,” an archaic term for a dummy or puppet in use in the 15th century. “Mammet” is derived from the Old French “Mahomet,” a version of the name Mohammed, referring to the founder of Islam. Use of “mammet” in this sense, and earlier as a synonym for “idol,” was due to, as the OED puts it, “the common medieval Christian belief that the prophet Muhammad was worshiped as a god.” So the evolution of “mammet” would have been from “false god” to “idol” to “scarecrow, doll, puppet.” The term “mammet” is also still used in regional English dialects to mean both “baby or child” and “hateful person; weakling.”

15 comments to Mommick / Mammock

  • Kjeri Kaye

    So, is Mammock related at all to amok as in “The furious chinchilla ran amok, mammocking everything in sight including the poodle.”

  • Paul Klein

    When you say Eastern NC, do you mean Carteret County, east of Beaufort? The term was in common usage in the ’50s and ’60s when I was growing up there.

    “Honey, he mommocked it!”

  • I recently began writing a column for the Goldsboro News-Argus, NC. An article I have just composed includes the word mommick, whhich was standard fare here in eastern North Carolina when I was growing up. The word puzzles most northern and western “intruders” but the homefolks understand, “Don’t mommick it up.” It simply means don’t mess it up or screw it up.

    Sherwood ‘Owl’ Williford

  • Ray Boyce

    I am from central WV and the word mommick was used by all from the previous generation.That would be 50 and 60’s . It mean to harass pester or torment, usually refer to a child.

  • Martin Malcolm

    ‘A General Dictionary of Provincialisms’ by William Holloway (Sussex Press, 1889)gives the usage I know, a noun: ‘mommick, a scarecrow’. Holloway traces it to the county of Somerset in England, UK. My Somerset-born-and-bred mother used to call me ‘a little mommick’ back in the 1960s. Now I know what she meant!

    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YBRJAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA111&lpg=PA111&dq=mommick+Somerset&source=bl&ots=K4JI1WnOif&sig=xW2KOxAQBcQvKRirOs-Y6m3eS2k&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uNOVU_aSJMWvPJOQgIgE&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mommick%20Somerset&f=false

  • Fred

    My dad, who died at 91, was from SE North Carolina, in the Rocky Mount area, and he used the word mommock quite often. I’ve only heard one other person in my life use that word.

  • Ashley39

    Both of my parents are from Rocky Mount NC and the word “mommick” means “messed up”
    “Ashley you sure mommicked up your head!”
    Meaning: They don’t like my hair. I messed it up.
    Another word from this region of NC “doot” pronounced “d-eww-t”. This means your behind or butt. “I busted my doot trying to skate!”
    Funny words!

  • Beth Dix

    My mother’s family is from eastern NC and my Grandpap would use the word mommick all the time. It could mean anything from don’t make a mess to don’t “tease” your sister….”Don’t mommick your sister like that”. It’s a great word. I use it all the time.

  • Karmin

    I’m from eastern NC and my granddaddy used to say, “You sure can mommick a biscuit!” because I only ate the middles and left a mess. I was lookin theceord up because I’ve never heard anyone else use it and my daughter also mommicks biscuits and I was remembering him fondly :)

  • Lefty

    My father (b. 1931 in NW Florida) used the word frequently with the same usage as in the original article.

  • Catherine Cook

    My mother grew up in North-Western North Carolina (Madison County) and she often used the term mommick to mean anything messed up or to mean that something causes nausea as in: That mess of collard greens pure mommicks me!

  • Patricia Frank

    I love the word “Mommick” or “Mommicked.” I’ve heard it used by Downeaasters here in Carteret County, NC. There is (or was?) a rock band from Emerald Isle, NC called “Pure T Mommicked”

  • Robin

    My daddy, who was born in 1908, hailed from Bluffton, SC and lived most of his life in Savannah, GA. However, he “ran on the big boats” up and down the East coast when he was in the Merchant Marines, so he was around folks from other places.
    “Mommicked up” was an expression he used often, and for him, it meant “messed up” or “screwed up”, such as “Don’t mommick up that cake!” said when he caught a young’un messing around cutting little pieces of cake and eating them one after another, whilst standing at the counter!
    He also referred to cookies as biscuits (which I know is British) and called female or mama cats “sow cats.” Seems as though the memory gates are opening…but I will save it for another time!

  • Helen

    This is all very interesting to me. My parents both used the word but whereas my dad was raised in an isolated bump in the road in Oregon by parents from Louisiana by way of Oklahoma, and Tennessee by way of whatever attracted his attention on the way west, my mom was born in Costa Rica to American parents and did not come to the States until she was 15. Both were raised around language of a previous generation. Another word that the families used was “faunching”, as in Faunching at the bit (horses), something i only saw in print once,i think it was in Green Grow the Lilies…

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