mother wit
See also: mother-wit
English
Alternative forms
Noun
- Inborn intelligence; innate good sense. [from 15th c.]
- c. 1591, William Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew, First Folio 1621, act 2, scene 1:
- Kate. Where did you study all this goodly speech?
- Petr. It is extempore, from my mother wit.
- 1596, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, IV.10:
- For all that nature by her mother-wit
- Could frame in earth, and forme of substance base,
- Was there […].
- 1820 March, [Walter Scott], chapter X, in The Monastery. A Romance. […], volume III, Edinburgh: […] Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and for Archibald Constable and Co., and John Ballantyne, […], →OCLC, page 244:
- His mother-wit taught him that he must not, in such uncertain times, be too hasty in asking information of any one, [...]
- 1830, James Fenimore Cooper, The Headsman, chapter 28:
- The buffoon, though accustomed to deception and frauds, had sufficient mother-wit to comprehend the critical position in which he was now placed.
- 1959 Dec. 21, "FICTION: The Year's Best," Time (retrieved 4 April 2011):
- Russian author Panova, writing with unostentatious excellence, has both the compassion and the mother wit to describe the world of a six-year-old—and to recall an existence that most grownups have forgotten.
- 2007 April 15, Terrence Rafferty, "Film: A Gumshoe Adrift, Lost in the 70's," New York Times (retrieved 4 April 2011):
- [T]he classic private eye could operate effectively and get to the bottom of things with nothing more than nerve, mother wit and local knowledge.
- c. 1591, William Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew, First Folio 1621, act 2, scene 1:
Synonyms
References
- “mother wit”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.