Pure-T Mommicked

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lori from North Carolina.

Hi, Lori, where in North Carolina are you?

Well, I’m standing in Jacksonville, North Carolina, but I live in Swansboro.

Okay.

I have lived here in North Carolina for about seven years now.

And there are a group of people who live in Carteret County.

They’re, oh, what we call down east, over towards Harker’s Island and out that way.

And my husband worked with many people like this, and they would use a word that was called pure tea momic.

And I always thought the word meant something like, I don’t know, confused or angry or it was just something different.

And, you know, I’m one of those Yankees that moved down here, and I, you know, where in the world would this word come from?

And do I have the use proper, I guess, what I’m asking?

So when would you hear this term?

Like a situation.

A situation.

Well, if somebody’s telling a story and, you know, maybe somebody cut them off in traffic.

You know, I was pure teemomic.

Okay, right.

Because somebody cut them off.

I mean, the funny part of it is if you go out into Moorhead City or over into Beaufort,

You can even find T-shirts and coffee mugs with this word on there.

With momicked, huh?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you’re right.

It’s definitely a negative term that can mean anything from all messed up to harassed or bothered or teased or even beaten up.

And you hear it all over the South, but particularly in eastern North Carolina, you hear that sense of it having to do with harassing or bothering.

A cat might momock a mouse before it actually kills it, that kind of thing.

Okay.

And it goes back to an old word that actually means to tear into pieces, M-A-M-M-O-C-K, momock.

And in fact, Shakespeare used it that way in one of his plays.

No way.

Yeah.

I should know that.

I’m an English teacher.

Very good.

Very good.

Well, go look at Corolianus because that play uses that sense of the word, momock, meaning to tear into pieces.

Okay.

Can you spell that again?

Well, the way that you probably see it on the coffee mugs or the T-shirts or whatever is M-O-M-M-I-C-K-E-D, right?

Does that sound right?

Yeah.

But in the historical sense, it’s M-A-M-M-O-C-K, right?

Yes.

Momic.

Yes, correct.

That’s how she used it.

There’s the verb and the nouns.

The noun just means pieces or shreds.

Okay.

So you might have a bunch of momic just be like residue or debris from something.

Oh, kind of like your brain when you’re confused.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But the first part of that expression, pure T-moment, what’s the pure T?

Pure N-T, I don’t know.

Like the letter T? Is that the way they’re spelling it?

Yeah.

That’s a fun one, too.

The pure T is a version of pure D.

And if you’re a good conservative Southerner, you might say pure D instead of pure damned.

That’s what that means.

Oh, okay.

Very interesting.

So we’re trying not to cuss.

Exactly.

Pure tea basically is completely or totally.

Yes.

Yes, just pure, damn, messed up.

Okay.

Great.

Awesome.

All right, well, thanks for calling, Lori.

We really appreciate the question.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Looking in the historical record, we can find that MAMIC does pop up all over North America,

But for some reason it’s become associated with just the Carolinas, right?

It’s kind of what we call a chamber of commerce word.

They’re rather proud that they have it, right?

Right, sort of like UFTA up in the north.

So when you want to find out, you know, when you start to talk about what a real local is, that’s one of the first things that they bring up is language like pure tea moment.

Yeah, I like it.

If you’ve got language that you think makes you a local, we would love to know what that is.

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