[wvbdmp]

Fun fact: I learned yesterday that that expression was popularized in English only as recently as 1991 by none other than Sadam Hussein when he referred to the Gulf War as “the mother of all battles”. At least that’s the story. Apparently it was a bit of a meme in the early nineties, so this post may be referencing it more or less directly. Hussein was of course referencing the Quran.

[Firehawke]

Yep. "Mother of all X" memes weren't even remotely uncommon for a handful of years during and after Operation Desert Storm. The Iraqi Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, also gave rise to "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and the like.

Almost none of those memes are remembered outside of those who were alive and watching the nightly news at the time, but there were some pre-internet memes that were as spread as a modern internet one.

[quickthrowman]

> Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, also gave rise to "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and the like.

If you don’t recognize that name, “Baghdad Bob” was the popular nickname he was given back in the 00s.

[Jtsummers]

Part of that popularity (for the "mother of all..." expressions) was Cheney's doing. Playing on Saddam Hussein's phrase "Mother of all battles" with "Mother of all retreats" when describing the retreat of the Iraqi army from Kuwait.

[bob1029]

The mother of all news conferences:

https://youtu.be/wKi3NwLFkX4

[xtiansimon]

During p45 they dropped the MOAB on Afghanistan. The name got stuck in my head.

I was making a lot of Jupyter Notebooks at the time. I would create several versions while narrowing down an algorithm or constructing the principle proof of concept code. When I finally arrived at an essential solution, I would make a single cell file that would write to disc. I named the file *-MOAF, Mother of All Files.

Some things don’t change.

https://archive.ph/Oxcsr