mammy's boy

plural mammy's boys

1. alternativeAlternative form of mama's boy.

   ‘Well, thanks a bunch for appreciating how much I try to look after you and our family!’ cried Giselle. ‘You’re such a mammy’s boy, aren’t you? As far as you’re concerned, there’s nobody in the whole world better at anything than your damn mother.[…]’

   2008, Sheila O’Flanagan, chapter 23, in Someone Special, London: Headline Review, →ISBN, page 358

   2 more examples

   “Mammy’s boy! mammy’s boy,” shouted the boys at play in the village school-yard. “How did you get away from the old woman’s apron-strings? Come and have a toss? O, no! He’s got to go home and see his mammy.” […] “He looks so much like a girl,” said Jim Howe, one day, “that he ought to be named like one.” Thereupon somebody set up the shout of “Sally,” and after that Sally, or “mammy’s boy,” was his appellation.

   1879 October 9, M[ary] F[raneis] Butts, “The Little Folks. Mammy’s Boy.”, in Bradford K. Peirce, editor, Zion’s Herald, volume LVI, number 41, Boston, Mass.: Boston Wesleyan Association, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 326, column 4

   Anyway, Bob didn’t like how Andrea and me were so close; he thought it made me soft, like I was a poncey little mammy’s boy and he didn’t want to have no sissy for a son. […] Like I said, Bob considered me to be a mammy’s boy, because I clung to my mother whenever he came home.

   2012, Dean Williams with John F. McDonald, chapter 1, in The Tearaway, London: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, pages 3 and 9

plural Mammy's boys

1. alternativeAlternative form of mama's boy.

   Not much sins you’d have with that Mammy’s boy from the tennis club.

   1991 December, Mary Cummins, “The Tiger and Pink Gin”, in True to Type: A Collection of Short Stories by Journalists in The Irish Times, Dublin: Irish Times Books; Sugarloaf Publications, →ISBN, page 24

   2 more examples

   When would Hamish come to her bed and make them truly husband and wife? Surely he wasn’t such a Mammy’s boy that he’d take weeks to get over her death?

   2000, Doris Davidson, chapter 8, in The House of Lyall, London: HarperCollinsPublishers, →ISBN, page 120

   “That woman breastfed Packie as a baby,” she’d told Laura one day, in shocked tones. “It’s small wonder he turned out to be such a Mammy’s boy.[…]”

   2004, Melissa Hill, chapter 21, in Not What You Think, Dublin: Poolbeg Press, →ISBN, page 281