This week: We're attempting to get our mojo back. Or to at least figure out where it went. Either way, we're talking about the word mojo. Let's get to it.
Mojo Gogo
I grew up in the 80s, my eyeballs glued to Mtv. Sometime around junior high school, as my musical tastes began to change, I began staying up later and later, trying to catch the really interesting music videos they only played after ten p.m. Videos like Mojo Nixon's “Elvis is Everywhere”. It’s a great song, but for me, it was most important as a gateway to the weirder side of rock 'n' roll, a place where Frank Zappa, Devo, and even the Flaming Lips held sway. And so, a year later, when another band of weirdos with a weird aesthetic and weirder sound put out a record called “Punk Rock Girl,1” which contained the lines-
We went to a shopping mall and laughed at all the shoppers
Security guards trailed us to a record shop
We asked for Mojo Nixon, they said, "He don't work here."
We said, "If you don't got Mojo Nixon then your store could use some fixin'."
And I said, “I get that reference!”2 But it wasn't until a decade and change later that Mike Meyers' Austin Powers movies entered the scene that mojo became part of my vocabulary. If I remember right (and I'm too lazy too look this up), Powers references his mojo in all three movies, before eventually revealing it to be an actual physical chemical in his body that can (and was) removed. Silliness aside, the phrase “getting my mojo back” permanently entered my vocabulary3 where I used it just last week.
If you've been reading for a while, you'll know that I've had a side-quest going4 wherein I make myself get outside and take some pictures every day. The first issue went out a few days ago and has been pretty well received. However, in that first issue, I talked a bit about how I feel like it's been so long since I really tried to make photos, I feel like I've lost my photo mojo5 a bit.
And then, while helping a friend6 research a word that surprised both of us by being pretty racist, I started to wonder about mojo's history and origins. And the thing is, I didn't really have a good reason to suspect that it was other than the word sounds vaguely “not English” to me.
But, there has been a trend, recently, of people compiling lists of the horrible antecedents of a lot of popular phrases. Some of these have visible origins in slavery like "being sold down the river" and “being grandfathered in,” while others, like “whitewashed” and “blacklisted” are less about specific historical events and emerged more as societal norms that ought to be examined. And, to be clear7, the trend does not stop with American slavery. No, there are words commonly used in English that originated or became slurs and derogatory terms for Jewish people, Native Americans, Asians, especially Chinese people, people with disabilities8, and on and on.
What to do about these words remains an ongoing debate. Some, like the aforementioned “sold down the river” could be, and possibly should be, removed from the vernacular. Others remain more firmly entrenched or useful despite their origins. But in any case, the first step to figuring out what to do begins with understanding the etymology of the word in question. And, given the tools that are available today vis a vis online dictionaries and databases, it made sense to follow my hunch and look up mojo's history.
First, we check-in with our good friends at Merriam-Webster:
:a magic spell, hex, or charm
broadly : magical power
Alright. No mentions of a scandalous past so far. Let's head over to Etymonline9 to double check:
“magic,” 1920s, probably of Creole origin; compare Gullah moco “witchcraft,” Fula moco'o"medicine man." It was noted in 1935 as an underworld name for “any of the poisonous, habit-forming narcotics.”
Again, nothing overt, nothing too problematic. But let's do one more check, this time using the Corpus of Historical American English:
Their first search return is from 1944 and is used as a name. The next few references also use it as either a name or a synonym for magical spell. Then, in the 70s, t.v. detective Kojak knows it as the street name for one of several hard drugs, and then as we move into the 80s and 90s, mojo goes back to being a term for magic before, in the early aughts, become something that one could lose and / or get back.
But it’s when I broaden10 out the search terms and start looking for mojo as a lyric that things start to get really interesting. Back in 1957, songwriter Preston Foster wrote a song called “Got My Mojo Working” that ended up being a single for Muddy Waters. During a pair of lawsuits that came a few years later, the courts decided that mojo, as a word, was so common as to be part of the public domain. In essence, the word mojo was too common to be copyrightable, implying that people of the day knew the term and what it meant, especially in the context of blues music.
So, racist? Not that I can tell. But my research into this was admittedly surface level. Someone may yet do a deep dive into the non-English roots of the word and find evidence that has not yet made it to mainstream information channel. And, for the moment, that’s enough. So channel your inner Austin Powers and go on and get your mojo back.
91 Days:
The 91 Days project is off and running. You can read up on the project, see how it’s going, or join in by following the links below. It’s a lot of fun so far and I’d love to see how other people do with the challenge.
Down the Rabbit Hole:
This week’s rabbit hole is actually related to the main topic for once! Here are a few articles discussing words of racist, sexist, or otherwise problematic origins. This is the tip of the iceberg; most of the terms the articles discuss are fairly well documented, a few are a little more speculative, and many get discussed in all the articles, but the point is just to be aware of where are language comes from so that we can use it more inclusively and more effectively.
CNN - Everyday words and phrases that have racist connotations
ABC - Here are some commonly used terms that actually have racist origins
Business Insider - 12 racist and offensive phrases that people still use all the time
From the Archives:
Given the amount of content that gets consumed by all of us all the time, it’s no wonder we forget about things we read just a few months ago. Even if you’re the one that wrote it.
The other night, I was talking with the members of my writer’s group and we got into a discussion about the word content and I kept thinking I had just had a similar discussion not too recently…turns out I had. With myself. And with you. So, this week, we’re going all the way back to March of this year, to Learned Volume 4, Issue 51: Content with Content. Enjoy!
Funnily enough, when Diesel Boy covered the song years later, they changed the Mojo Nixon lines to, “We said, 'if you don't got Gigi Allen then we're gonna burn your mall down!” Faster tempo, same energy.
Shoutout to Captain America.
Well, mine and everyone else’s.
91 Days. Subscribe here.
Let's be honest, “photo mojo” is a great phrase but it's not a patch on Mojo Jojo. And if you don't know who that is, I've got a great cartoon for you.
The incomparable Natasha Mott, who hosts the sublimely provocative Syllojism podcast, to which you should all go listen right away.
Also to be clear, I’m drawing a line between words that are actually racist, classist, or sexist in origin and might ought to be avoided if a suitable synonym exists, and words that someone might claim are cultural appropriation. That’s a subject for a whole other article.
See the recent kerfuffle with Lizzo's inadvertent use of a slur in one of her songs.
The very next entry after mojo is mojito, which pleases me for reasons I can't really explain.
Complicated by the fact that mojo, in Spanish, pronounced moho, means sauce. So lots of search results end up going to a totally different word that just happens to be spelled the same way sometimes in some contexts. Not confusing at all.
The same thing. Mojo to Mojito made me smile too.