mother [OE] English mother, Dutch moeder, and German Mutter share their ancient ancestor with Latin mater (source of madrigal [L16th] via an Italian term meaning ‘maternal, simple, primitive’, maternal [LME], matriarch [E17th], matrimony [ME], matrix [LME], and matter [ME] the last two containing the idea of something from which something is made or born). The root probably came from the use of the sound ma made by babies, identified by mothers as a reference to themselves. The British expression some mothers do ‘ave ‘em, commenting on a person’s clumsy or foolish behaviour, was apparently originally a Lancashire saying. The comic Jimmy Clitheroe popularized it, as ‘don’t some mothers ’ave ’em’, in his BBC radio programme The Clitheroe Kid, which ran from 1958 to 1972. The phrase gained further currency as the title of a 1970s BBC television comedy series, Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, in which Michael Crawford starred as the clumsy, accident-prone Frank Spencer. The former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is remembered as having promised the mother of all battles on the eve of the first Gulf War. On 7 January 1991 The Times reported that he had no intention of relinquishing Kuwait and was ready for the ‘mother of all wars’. The proverb necessity is the mother of invention is first recorded in 1658, in Northern Memoirs by R. Franck: ‘Art imitates Nature, and Necessity is the Mother of Invention.’ The idea can be traced back further to classical times, to the Roman satirist Persius, who stated that ‘The belly is the teacher of art and giver of wit’.