HELP!! Its slang!!

[Wes]

My wife asked me today the meaning of Mamma...from the Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie. She is telling me that she thinks it is slang.

She also said its not the standard dictionary def either....any help guys???


THANKS!!!!

[Epictetus]

Can you help with the context, like posting the sentence that it comes from?

[M. Demetrius]

(In the US, we have "Mamma jokes", which usually start off with, "Yo' Mamma is so fat (or old, or dumb, or....)" No disrespect intended to anybody's mother.) Yo' mamma is so fat, they charge admission when she swims at Sea World.

M is one of the sounds that comes fairly naturally to babies, and the ah sound is one of the first, too. But Mama means Mother in quite a few languages. Some speculate that it's a surviving word from the proposed primordial language, pre Babel.

[Titvs Statilivs Castvs]

In (Flemish/"normal") Dutch "mama" indeed means "mother".

[Memmia]

Yo' mamma is so fat, they charge admission when she swims at Sea World.

Mater tua tam obesa est ut cum Romae est, urbs habet octo colles :twisted:

[Wes]

She said it does not mean Mother, and the dictionary she looked in refers to certain Motherly parts, which are not the meaning either....I am waiting for her to bring the book home so I can read the passage..

[richsc]

I'd need to see the entire phrase. This is from 1926 and is a Hercule Poirot myster, so won't have *any* American slang in it.
I might even have the book here somewhere.....what chapter is it in?