Fascinating!
If you say Mom, you'll have about 15 women look.
At my family reunion, if you called 'Margaret', every single woman in the room would turn around. However, if you called Mum, *your* Mum would turn around because she'd recognise the plaintiff bleating of her own offspring.
Pam, I think you're right. Informality comes with age - although my Auntie Margaret specifically had to ask us to stop calling her Auntie because she said it made her feel old to have twenty-somethings and older calling her Auntie <g>.
And on another side note, I remember when my nieces were little, they'd call their parents by their first names rather than Mum and Dad. I think this was because their parents referred to each other using their first names, whether in front of the kids or not, so my nieces quite logically assumed that's what *they* were supposed to call them too.
I noticed that when they began school, all of a sudden it was Mummy and Daddy - presumably because that's what the other kids called *their* parents.
Yvonne
