This is Sunday’s word - Mother of Invention incorrect

[t-bob]

MOTHER WIT


noun
1. natural or practical intelligence, wit, or sense.

Quotes
... not one of the rest of us had the guts, the gumption, or the mother wit to recognize where all four of us were headed and drag the fool to a stop.
-- David Weber, How Firm a Foundation, 2011

One's mother wit was a precious sort of necromancy, which could pierce every mystery at first sight ....
-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Devereux, 1829


Origin
Mother knows best, as they say. In mother wit, the word mother means "innate, inborn." Wit comes from a very widespread Proto-Indo-European root weid-, woid-, wid- “to see, know.” This root appears in Latin vidēre “to see,” Sanskrit veda “knowledge,” Greek ideîn (and dialect wideîn) “to know” (literally “to have seen”), Slavic (Czech) vědět “to know” and vidět “to see.” From wid- Germanic (Old English) has the verb witan “to know.” In Old English the first and third person singular form was wāt “I know; he/she/it knows,” which survives today as the obsolete word wot (“God wot”). Mother wit entered English in the 15th century.

[Dub]

My father used to say “The road to hell is paved with good inventions.”

[jdd2]

you're talking about old wives' tales, right?