mommy?

I have recently become a mother, and so am in the process of exploring what this means. I have a daughter who is now 9 months old, and these past months have been a learning adventure. I was perhaps not very well prepared for motherhood, and expected to learn a lot about what it means to be a mother. But I thought I had, at the very least, a reasonable grasp on what the word mother means. It turns out there’s more to it than I realized.

I was at a meeting where we were looking at materials from an NLP course. We got to a section on word sense ambiguity, and instead of having just the standard bank/bank examples, a slide had this example of 2 definitions for mother:

a woman who has given birth to a child

or

a stringy slimy substance consisting of yeast cells and bacteria; is added to cider or wine to produce vinegar

Stringy slimy substance? A quick look up confirmed it:

moth‧er2 /ˈmʌðər/ –noun
a stringy, mucilaginous substance consisting of various bacteria, esp. Mycoderma aceti, that forms on the surface of a fermenting liquid and causes fermentation when added to other liquids, as in changing wine or cider to vinegar

Not just stringy and slimy, but mucilaginous. Shouldn’t I have known about this?