mother's son
3
7.7
- noun
- /ˈmʌðərz sʌn/
- Literature
:
hijo de madre
- good as any mother's son
Examples
-
Ultimately, in fact, she agreed with what everyone knew Adam thought but had never put into words: Miles and Fergus were their mother's sons and, like Betty, saw Adam Kingsley only in terms of their meal ticket.
Fiction book (1996) -
Not a mother's son or daughter in that dayroom missed a thing, although nurses kept scampering back and forth, back and forth, unseeing.
Fiction book (1996) -
The picture of a mother’s son in jail hangs on her wall as proof that beauty is possible even in the most wretched.
Fiction book (1996) -
In any event, the police ambushed and executed every mother's son in the sizable squad sent to knock over a bank chosen carefully for its imperialist affiliation.
Fiction book (1996) -
While Jazz, with his long, angular, well-chiseled features, was clearly his mother's son, Kent bore more of a resemblance to the middle-aged man Foster Taylor had become.
Fiction book (1996) -
Every man in the room is some mother's son who deserves respect.
-
You should treat him well; after all, he is just another mother's son like you.
-
It's easy to forget that every mother's son has his own story and struggles.
Surface Forms
Morphology
mother's + son
The constituents 'mother's' + 'son' literally point to a male person (a mother's son), so a learner who knows both words can infer a relation to men. However, the phrase's conventionalized collective sense meaning 'every man' (the universal force and idiomatic usage) is not fully predictable from the parts alone, making the expression partially but not fully transparent to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Mother's son comes from a simple image: every man is someone's child, so he has a mother and is her son. Saying mother's son stressed that each man was included, so it came to mean 'every man'.