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.