Talk:Mother Church
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The orthography of this term bothers me. I think it should be mother church. I've not been able to ascertain this, but in my well-thumbed tome entitled Webster's New World Dictionary and Thesaurus of the American Language (World Publishing Company, 1970), entries with the prefix "mother" include:
- mother country
- motherhood
- mother image
- motherland
- mother lode
But there is no entry for "motherchurch" or "mother church". In the entries where mother is used as an adjective (for country, image or lode), the noun being modified is something tangible. You can visit a country. You can look at an image. You can prospect a lode for gold. In the instances where mother is an integral part of noun, I seem to notice that the resultant noun is "intangible" and descriptive of a concept (motherhood, motherland). Any thoughts on this? Aloysius Patacsil 00:57, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
I agree that this article should be "Mother Church". A Google search for "Mother Church" returns 717,000 hits. "motherchurch" returns 826 hits. At a ratio of more than 860 to 1, I think "Mother Church" wins. --Do go be man 21:40, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
