Because You Asked: Moxy Etymology
I’m unabashedly fascinated by the search terms people who’ve gotten to this site have used (there may be recent ones here). I wish I had better access to the logs so I could set up Jim Flanagan’s nifty tideghost script. But I guess I can set that up for some other site somewhere…
Anyways, some poor sap got dumped here by a search for “moxy etymology”. This sort of search, I’ve learned, is generally not the greatest way to get decent information on a word, but I view it as a Cry for Help — a Request by the Internet that a Pedant somewhere, be he never so sciolistic, hold forth.
…
“Moxy” is a fairly recent word, mainly American, meaning something like “spunk, hoo-ha, bravado, get up and go, sass”. Stuffy ol’ OED calls it slang and insists on spelling it “moxie”, which spelling the Dictionary of American Regional English also prefers. So does google. And Merriam Webster. Hmm…
It comes from Moxie (trademark 1924), a soft drink. It showed up in its modern meaning pretty quickly. DARE and OED have this quotation from 1930: “Personally, I always figure Louie a petty-larceny kind of guy, with no more moxie than a canary bird.”
This quote captures part of the vibe of “moxy” for me — the word’s got moxy. It wouldn’t surprise you to see it in an old gangster film, or in hard-boiled fiction. In 1955 the Publications of the American Dialect Society note “blows his moxie” as a kind of cant equivalent of “loses his nerve”.
Stuffy ol’ OED doesn’t deign to dirty its feet in the bogs of moxy’s history before the soft drink, but DARE’s got a bit more moxy, and points out the existence of a precursor to the soft drink — a patent medicine named Moxie, developed around 1880 and once advertised as a “nerve food”. Actually, maybe I’m being a bit hard on OED. They do have a nice early quotation which refers to this patent medicine and tickles at the edges of our modern “moxy”: H.C. De Mille in 1890: “Young man, you’ve got nerve enough to start a Moxie factory.”
Holy Crow! I just looked around a bit and Moxie is still around! And a trillion people have already written THIS SAME ESSAY, only with more knowledge behind it. What a drag, the internet clearly already knows all about this. “And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.” Go here, everything there is much better than this.
Let’s just finish this up. Why name a patent medicine Moxie? According to DARE, it is after a Maine plant, some sort of evergreen variously called moxie, moxie berry, moxie vine, moxie plum. This makes sense, given that the founder of the Moxie company was from Maine… The moxie plant in turn DARE reckons to perhaps be called after an Algonquian base, “maski-”, meaning “medicine”.
September 21st, 2003 at 12:58 am
dude, i’d been wanting to try this stuff since i heard of it (my first love was for the word, not the bev), and i finally happened across it at the stah mahket the other day. the shit is NASTY NASTY NAAAAAASSSSTEEEEEEE. you should try it, just to be amazed that they consider it something appropriate for sale to human beings for recreational use. it tastes like it should be curing some horrible disease that people generally don’t get anymore. btw, we should also do lunch w/becky and erica. peace mug.
October 27th, 2004 at 3:14 am
i’m afraid the OED has you on all points re the origin, use and spelling of ‘Moxie’. as Coke once was the “pause that refreshes”, Moxie was the drink that gave you the “get-up and go” [a phrase borrowed by the Prairie Home Companion]. it’s ads featured pretty, fresh-looking young girls apparently bursting with energy. i dont have the formulation at the moment but it originated at the time when soft drinks were not necessarily carbonated and commonly contained, not only caffiene, but cocaine, bella donna or even opium and these substances could be bought OTC, so it may have contained any of these as well.
October 27th, 2004 at 9:35 am
What I can’t figure is why, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, you attempt to continue spelling it moxY. One of those cases where you spelled it wrongly the first time you ever wrote it, & now can’t bring yourself to break the habit? Best defense is a good offense?? *LOL*
Oddly, in case you’re wondering, the link to here was actually used in the caption for today’s APOD, or Astronomy Picture Of the Day - a staple for us stargazer types.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap041027.html
(Only, it was spelt correctly!) *grin*
~*
October 27th, 2004 at 10:13 am
Far out! I think that APOD is the coolest - a continual source of wonder - and I’m amazingly baffled and honored to have been linked from there.
October 27th, 2004 at 11:12 am
This is a band that is currently on an extended haitus:
http://www.fruvous.com/
February 12th, 2005 at 10:05 am
Moxie is a “tonic”. The inside 128 natives should have a good idea ’bout that. Moxy? A plant? Dunno ’bout that. I grew up in s. central Mass, while Moxie was not common, it existed I think Polar was the local bottler.
I have to do some hoop jumping to get Moxie here in GA. Monarch (who owns the petent) is based in Atlanta. Once I called them about it and they sent me a t-shirt.
It is much more fun to be differnt, in 1960’s ads featuring Ted Williams - “Make Mine Moxie!”