I nicknamed my mother Marmee after we went to a matinee at the second-or-third-or tenth-run theater to see the 1949 film of Little Women. The mother in the movie (Mary Astor) was called Marmee.

“Marmee,” I asked “can we go buy the book?”

“I’ve got it at home.” Then she looked at me, startled. “Did you call me Marmee?”

“Yes, Marmee.” I wanted to be like Jo March, aka June Allyson.

And then I read the book Little Women, and its less vibrant sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys. In the latter two, Jo sacrifices her writing to help her middle-aged German husband run a boys’ school. (Oh, God, Jo! Too much reality!)

Little Women (an all-ages classic) is one of the most amusing 19th-century American novels, or so I thought when I reread it about a decade ago after the Library of America released two volumes of Alcott’s writings, including her adult novel, Work, and Transcendental Wild Oats, a satire of life on her father’s disorganized commune. They almost starved in the commune under his vegetarian regime.

Though not my favorite of Alcott’s books, Little Women is surprisingly witty. When Jo’s sisters complain about the weather in November, Jo says, “That’s why I was born in it.” At a dance, Jo burns the back of her dress while standing in front of the fire and leans against the wall to hide it, because her older sister, Meg, is embarrassed. Laurie, a shy boy who knows no one – he recently moved to town to live with his rich grandfather – offers to dance with her in the hall where they can romp and no one will see the burn. They become best friends.

But the novel is not all frolics. Jo’s younger sister, Amy, causes her great pain in various episodes. She burns Jo’s manuscript – Jo has been writing a book of fairy tales – and later takes a trip to Italy with their great-aunt, who had promised to take Jo. Then Amy marries Laurie. Jo forgives and forgets, and didn’t want to marry him anyway, but it’s tough for us readers. Amy matures, but is not, in my view, a sympathetic character.

But to get back to my point: where did the word Marmee come from? In a Letter to the Editor of The New York Times Book Review, Ellen St. Sure, an archivist in Brewster, Massachusetts, said she had come across the word many times in letters and other documents. She clarified the pronunciation: the “r” is silent, so it is Mahm-my or Mommy.

I still say Marmee, though.

Different generations call their mothers by different names. My mom called her mother “Mother.” Very formal, but much prettier than the word Mom, I think. But “Mother” was my mother’s mother. Thus, Mom could not be Mother. And of course there’s Mama. We called her that sometimes. And there’s Ma, a word that strikes me as particularly ugly. Think regional dialect: Marjorie Rawling’s The Yearling (Pulitzer winner ), Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and many of his other books, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (though Huckleberry only had a pa). I’ve embraced dialect in recent years, but for a long time avoided books with dialect.

And the word Mother goes back to the Latin mater and the ancient Greek word μητήρ (which sounds very like the Latin). It probably goes back farther, but that is as far as I go.

By the way, if you’re interested in Alcott, I recommend Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. All of these philosophers, feminists, and writers lived in Concord, MA. I also enjoyed Anne Boyd Rieux’s Meg Jo Beth Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters.

And on another note: What do you call your mother? Mom? Marmee? Mother? Near the end of her life, my mom left her first name in messages on the answering machine. But she would always be Mom or Marmee to me.