http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_of_all wrote:
<<"Mother of all..." has become a stock phrase in English-language public discourse and popular culture. It implies the largest or most significant example of a class, which completely overshadows all other cases in the class. For example, "the mother of all battles" would imply the largest, most destructive, most significant battle ever fought.
The phrase "the mother of all..." was popularized in recent years, though not introduced, by Saddam Hussein, then President of Iraq, after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Bulletins to Iraqi citizens advised them to prepare for an invasion and "the mother of all battles" if the US-led coalition forces attempted to evict his army of occupation from Kuwait. The phrase "mother of all battles" in this instance was a translation of the Arabic expression Umm al-Ma'arik. This is a common trope in Arabic public rhetoric. As Saddam's audience would have understood, it refers to the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah in AD 637, when an Arab army defeated the Persians.
The expression "the mother of all" has spread widely through English-language media and culture. It continues to be widely used: Time magazine headed its story on the 2008 financial crisis "Washington Prepares the Mother of All Bailouts". In the same context the Wall Street Journal referred to "The Mother of All Mondays". Massive Ordnance Air Blast munitions (MOAB) have been nicknamed "Mother of all bombs" due to their identical acronyms.
In 1994, the term was retroactively applied to "The Mother of All Demos", a 1968 demonstration of several then-new computer technologies, such as the computer mouse and hypertext.
The phrase "the mother of all..." had been used in the past in the sense of the origin of all of a particular class of things, rather than the most significant. In that context, Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanack (1755) wrote, "A full Belly is the Mother of all Evil." In the same sense, the phrase was used in the King James Version of the Bible in 1611 (Galatians 4:26, "But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all") and in the literal sense regarding Eve as "mother of all living" (Genesis 3:20).
Phrases such as "mother of all wisdom" exist at least as far back as 1853.>>
