The word, if you're silent

Usage examples of mum.

Manning a month, when Mum began to complain about all the Aborigines living in the swamp.

Yes, and Mum said if we ave any more lodgers we might get a bit rich, then we could all ave two weeks oliday at Margate instead of only one.

It took Mum a long time to get ready and while she powdered her face and arranged the elaborate ornamented folds of her head-gear and dug out her necklaces and bangles, her wrappers and white shoes, and plaited her hair hurriedly in the mirror, Dad was already asleep on his three-legged chair.

It was charged upon the duties on malt, mum, cyder, and perry, the land-tax at four shillings in the pound, annuities on the sinking-fund, an application of one million from that deposit, and the loan of the like sum to be charged on the first aids of next session.

Mum dips the cows, deworms them, brands them with our brand, feeds them up on the Rhodes grass until their skins are shiny and they are so fat it seems as if they might burst, and then sends them on the red lorry into Umtali, to the Cold Storage Corporation, to be sold as ration meat.

Ordinarily I don't mind getting softly drunk next to the slowly collapsing heap that is Mum, but I have to go back to boarding school the next day, nine hours by pickup across the border to Zimbabwe.

Mum and Dad don't use the siren except to announce their arrival at parties.

Mum, learning at her knee about whelping and worming, infections, dysplasia, mites and ticks.

With the careless mechanicism of human speech, the technicalities of practical mumming were retained in these productions when they had ceased to be concerned with the stage at all.

A host of adoring Mums and Dads, all of whom thought their particular daughter a budding Margot Fonteyn, watched proudly.

They talked to me about their lives at home and what part of the country their Mums and Dads had come from.

If he had, it might have given children a chance to run away from him when he tried to trap them in his spare bedroom and pin them to the single bed with his fat gray-hair-sprouting belly while mums and dads drank coffee in the kitchen with his stick-insect purple-mottled bruised-and-battered wife.

We looked in mute horror at all those frazzled, frequently pregnant young mums dragging their sobbing brats past another sugar counter, and all those ominously silent, red-faced fathers ready to explode at the first wrong word from their sulking, surly children, and we thought - we are better than that.

There were the usual people out enjoying the late August sun - mums with toddlers, a few joggers, a guy on a bench listening to his Walkman and a number of teens hanging out farther down the hill.

The waitresses used to the violence of a back street cafe with its drunks and druggies and single mums and unemployable youths were frozen to the spot.