Moxie

In 1876, Dr. Augustin Thompson of Lowell, Massachusetts, created a bitter syrup he called Moxie Nerve Food and marketed it as a remedy for nervous exhaustion and insomnia. The name likely came from an Abenaki word meaning "dark water," which appears in the names of rivers, lakes, and falls throughout Maine, where Thompson was born. He claimed to have named the product after a Lieutenant Moxie who had discovered the plant extract, though no evidence of such a person has ever been found.

Thompson carbonated the formula in the 1880s and began selling it as a soft drink, making Moxie one of the first mass-produced carbonated beverages in the United States, predating the national distribution of both Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper. The company's advertising was aggressive and ubiquitous, featuring the slogan "Make Mine Moxie" and a pointing "Moxie Man" logo introduced in 1911. Moxie bottle wagons and later Moxiemobiles traveled across the Northeast dispensing samples.

By the 1920s, the brand name had detached from the bottle. Writers began using "moxie" as slang for nerve, courage, and determination. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest known use of the lowercase word to 1930, in the writing of Damon Runyon. The shift was straightforward. The drink had promised to build up your nerve, and the word absorbed the promise.

President Calvin Coolidge was a known Moxie drinker, and Ted Williams endorsed it on radio. Maine designated Moxie its official state soft drink in 2005. The Coca-Cola Company purchased the brand in 2018. The bitter gentian-root flavor that made it famous remains divisive, which may be appropriate for a word that describes the willingness to do what others will not.