I just finished a fascinating book about life in America a century ago. Back in the 1920s baseball was everyone's obsession, Babe Ruth became our first national celebrity, and mass communication (radio and print newspapers) spread news with astonishing speed. (The book, an award-winning best-seller, is "The Big Fella" by Jane Leavy [2018])
Primary sources quoted in the book illustrate how language evolves. Not just slang, like phrases I gleefully played with as a kid in the 1960s ("Right on, man!", "groovy"), but vocabulary spoken in ordinary conversation. Some words commonly deployed then have since been replaced by new ones.
Here's an example. Today we talk about "grit" -- that laudable quality some folks have to persevere through hardship. We admire the force of their character, their determination. Back in the 1920s, a popular word used for this was "moxie". A person who had moxie was strong, vigorous and capable of enduring anything.
The word moxie itself is interesting: it originated in the 1870s as the (capitalized) commercial name of a "medicinal" elixir. (The beverage was actually just a carbonated energy drink with no medicinal value.) Widespread ads for "Moxie" later led "moxie" to evolve into a personal characteristic.
"Hey, it takes moxie to climb Coney Mountain!"
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