It must have been thinking about my mother & her mother which suddenly brought to mind a word that I probably haven’t used for – half a century.
Pother (rhymes with bother); origin obscure, but may have something to do with dust.
That was certainly one of its meanings. When the time for spring cleaning came round you gave a room a good pothering – chasing out every last mote from each cranny, crack or corner. For the rest of the year you had to learn to dust properly, so as not to raise a pother, since that only spread the dust around.
You might however give a cushion a good pothering – tossing it up & beating it with your opened palms to simultaneously remove the dust & plump it up nicely. Or you could pother a rug hanging over the washing line – give it a good going over with the carpet beater.
It had figurative meanings too. You could make, or get into a pother. Make an unnecessary fuss about something, or get into a state of irrational anger or anxiety. Stop pothering, or What are you making such a pother about? were the usual reactions.
It’s possible that only, or mainly, women got into a pother. And so the OED has two useful quotes for feminists. The first, from Vita Sackville-West’s’ All Passion Spent: What a pother, she thought, women make about marriage.
The second from Susan Faludi’s Backlash: Young women, magazine writers informed, no longer wanted to be bothered with ‘all that feminist pother’.
The OED also allows the form potheration meaning confusion, turmoil, trouble; its close cousin, BOTHERATION! was my mother’s emprecation of choice. When really vexed, this expanded to Oh DRAT AND BOTHERATION!
I am sure it would do the nation’s health an awful lot of good if we forgot about being stressed & just started getting in to pothers again.
