La madre di tutte le battaglie. Una polirematica esotica

The paper deals with a formula that had an enormous diffusion in the Italian journalistic language, especially during the Nineties of the last century, namely la madre di tutte le battaglie.The work aims at reconstructing the etymology of the expression that goes back to a famous Saddam Hussein’s phrase. Saddam employed it from the middle of 1990 onwards, immediately after the invasion of Kuwait. As a matter of fact, the Arabic phrase umm al-macārik (“the mother of battles”) means “the supreme battle” and occurred in most of the official speeches made by Saddam between 1991 and 2003. The phrase has also been widely used in naming many Iraqi places and events during Saddam’s dictatorship. From January 1991, when “Desert Storm” military operations took place, this formula was introduced into the European languages through the translation made by the major English-speaking news agencies. Mother of all battles and the Italian translation la madre di tutte le battaglie (1991) are calques of the Arabic formula umm al-macārik. As far as the semantic value is concerned, it is worth noting that Engl. mother of all battles and Ital. madre di tutte le battaglie indicated properly “the progenitor of all battles” (not the “supreme battle”). The grammaticalized function of Ar. umm “mother” could not be reproduced in Western languages. Therefore, the ideological expression umm al-macārik, which was typical of the Iraqi Bacathist jargon, successfully entered the European languages as a sort of “induced metaphor” (Gusmani) thanks to a dramatic distortion or “disfigurement” (Ital. defigurazione according to Orioles) of the original semantic value of Engl. mother of all/Ital. madre di tutte.