From Urban dictionary Moxie (1 Viewer)

moxy

A word that would be better suited to being on the 'oldtimey-dictionary.com' website. If you are told that you have moxy it means one of three things:
1.) What the Hollywood world today calls 'it.'
2.) You have an great amount of courage or bravery to do what you want do to.
3.) You have Herpes (which was originally called Moxygoshthisitchesherpes but was shortened to just Herpes in the mid-60's)

1.) You, my good boy, have moxy and with your dancing monkies you will soon be the toast of Vaudville!!
2.) Barnabus must have a great deal of moxy to just whip it out in front of his girlfriends parents like that.
3.) Sheryl is disgusting...I think she gave me moxy.
 
Moxy is a good word - I only came across it reading Bukowski - it is primarily an american word. not really used in europe. so it was quite a good word to come wander upon reading.

Moxy::) :) Courage, balls, intestinal fortitude.
 
Shadings of meaning for "moxie", from my experience of hearing it used in conversation countless times while growing up (I'm 58): guts, style, nerve. It's a word that was used by my parents' generation (Buk's generation), but it didn't pass down to my generation. We heard it, understood it, but never used it. It was out of fashion by, perhaps, the 1950s, surely by the 60s. Buk used a lot of outdated language like that. I think he did it consciously, to signal that he had no interest in being hip, but was an old school writer like Hemingway, Fante, etc.
 
I mentioned this "moxie" discussion to my 18 year old well-read valedictorian daughter (sure, I'm proud of her), and -- surprisingly -- she was familiar with the word. She defined it as "spunk", which gets at the attitude aspect of the word. Says there was a fashion mag/catalog put out a few years ago called MOXIEGIRL. So it appears the word was used by Buk's generation, fell into disuse with my generation (the so-called baby boomers ... God, I hate that term) and now has been picked up again to some extent by a younger generation.

Another slang term that Buk used, that was known to my generation but not used: "shackjob." We might have said "shacked up," but it would have been with irony, identifying its use with our parent's generation. I never heard anyone my age say "shackjob" -- that was archaic.
 
cirerita said:
I completely agree, and how!

Funny, cirerita!

Now I ought to go do something productive. It's Saturday afternoon, for Chrissake! (another obsolete slang term?)
 
B used the term "turkeyneck" quite often, and I've never seen any other author -or living/dead person, for that matter- using this term....
 
cirerita: I've heard "turkeyneck" in conversation, but not seen it in print, other than in Bukowski's writings.
 
David,

if that's the case, it means that B definitely used those terms on purpose, knowing they were outdated. that's part of what's called "style", I guess.
 
cirerita

I've always suspected that Bukowski did use out of date terms like "moxie" and "turkeyneck" intentionally. He seems to have been hypersensitive to language and nuances of literary style. When I came across those old slang terms while reading him, I always assumed he knew exactly what he was doing, using them to evoke an image of being an "old school" writer. Possibly he did this to distance himself from all current literary and cultural fads. In an ironic way, by not being "of today", he gave a classic, timelessness to his work. It seems to me he usually made choices in his work that avoided pinning the narrative down to a specific time. In some of his stories, you can't tell if it's in the 1940s or the 1970s. I think his storehouse of old slang was a tool he used to create this timeless place. Just my hunch.
 
cirerita:

I never heard "suckerfish" growing up. Maybe it's some regional slang Buk picked up in his early travels around the U.S. I couldn't tell you what it means.
 
Oh, it means a miserable person, a nobody, a 100% sucker.

actually, it's a fish :D

the word appears a few times in Come On In! -well, and in many other books by B- I think in poems from the 80's, but I suspect the term was quite outdated by that time and, again, B used it intentionally.
 
Nice discussion on this word. Just shows how much information/history can be packed into a word. And Buk was very aware of this. I associate moxie with the word mojo, and sort of always attributed it to black slang (if that is the correct term). Most of the workers at the LA post office were (are?) black, aren't they? Buk must have picked up a great deal of black slang.
Moxie also has an entry on Wikpedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie How about tasting this beverage and giving feedback to the forum? :D

On sucker fish: I always assumed this was Buk's own term based on the real sucker fish; you know the hangers on that live off the crumbs dropped by sharks & whales...
 
mojo

That often elusive quality that sets a person apart from everyone else. The word "magic" could, almost without exception, replace "mojo" in all of its contexts, sentences, and/or applications.


I just saw David Lee Roth on Leno last night. He did a country version of an old Van Halen song ... he has DEFINITELY lost his mojo!!

It seems one has to have the moxie to get their mojo to work.


Try this link. It may provide insight into a poem or two...or not
http://www.thefedoralounge.com/archive/index.php/t-636.html

I as a North American usually assumed slangs written were understood by Europeans. Guess thats why I'm on this forum.
 

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