M'aidez French for "Help me," which is pronounced in English like "Mayday," a universal radio code indicating extreme distress.
Martha In Luke 10:38-42, Martha, a Bethany housekeeper, works so hard at welcoming Jesus to her home that she fails to take advantage of his teachings.
matrix the living tissue in which an embryo grows. The word matrix derives from mater, the Latin word for mother.
memento mori Latin for "remember that you must die," an inscription used by the pious on tombstones and monuments.
Milk and Honey a food shop named for a biblical allusion to abundance, which is repeated in Exodus 3:8, Exodus 33:3, and Jeremiah 11:5.
Monotheocracies religious dictatorships based on the worship of one god.
"The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow" an evocative line from Clement Moore's A Visit from St. Nicholas (1823). Offred's recitation of a verse from children's poetry suggests a female breast, purity, her fall from innocence, vulnerability, and the cycles of the moon, symbolic of fertility.
National Homeland One a parallel to schemes by Marcus Garvey and others who sought to resettle African slaves in their native land.
national resources figuratively, fertile women.
Nick, the private Eye a pun linking the chauffeur with Nick Charles, sleuth in The Thin Man, a popular 1934 movie starring William Powell, with Myrna Loy portraying Nora, his wife and sidekick. Peter Lawford reprised the role in a television series of the same name.
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum a botched version of the Latin aphorism Non illegitimi carborundum, meaning "Don't let the bastards wear you down."
Ours is not to reason why a paraphrase of a line from Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade," a way poem describing the pointless deaths of soldiers dispatched into battle against impossible odds.
