Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Cryptoengineer <petertrei@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: R.I.P. Ben Shecter, 89, in Feb., illustrated "The Mother Market"
 (1966)
Date: Fri, 9 May 2025 16:58:06 -0400
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 5/7/2025 8:27 PM, Lenona wrote:
> He died on Feb. 28th. He was also a designer for theatre, opera, ballet
> and TV.
> 
> Originally, Nancy Brelis' book was titled "The Mummy Market."
> 
>  From the New York Times, in 1966:
> 
> "Three children search for an ideal mother in this fantasy..."
> 
> It's not exactly sci-fi, but the book DID get listed at the ISFDB.
> 
> https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2408330
> 
> "The Mother Market" was the title used in 1975, almost a decade after it
> was published.
> 
> (Which raises the question - since I'm pretty sure the author was
> American, when did calling your mother "Mummy" become so much less
> common, in the U.S.? I'm kind of surprised the author used the original
> title as late as 1966, given the likelihood of reader confusion!)

Good question. Brelis was born in 1929.

I can attest from personal memory that 'mummy' for mother was
basically absent from American English (at least in NYC) in the
early 60s, but I encountered it frequently when I moved to England
in 1968.

'Mommy' seems to have become popular starting in the 1940s.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=mommy%2Cmummy&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true

pt