Mox nix

January 25, 2025 @ 5:12 pm · Filed by under Borrowing, Idioms, Negation

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A contributor to one of the series I oversee wrote to me as follows:

As always, feel free to edit as you see fit, and to use my name or not, depending on context. ("Mox nix" as the GIs like to say in Germany, showing off their German.)   

Although I had never seen "mox nix" written before, I instantly knew what he meant.

Here's the entry for "mox nix" in Wiktionary:

Alternative forms

Etymology

An alteration of German macht nichts (“doesn't matter”) that originated among American soldiers stationed in Germany after World War II.

Pronunciation

Interjection

mox nix

    1. (dated, slang) it doesn't matter; no worries

Adjective

mox nix (not comparable)

    1. (dated, slang) unimportant, irrelevant

References

^ Eric Partridge, 1986, A Dictionary of Catch Phrases: British and American, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day, 2nd edn., p. 314.

Here is a list of such pseudo-German words in English.  They are:

…adapted from the German language in such a way that their meanings in English are not readily understood by native speakers of German (usually because of the new circumstances in which these words are used in English).

  • blitz or "the Blitz" (chiefly British use) – The sustained attack by the German Luftwaffe during 1940–1941, which began after the Battle of Britain. It was adapted from "Blitzkrieg" (lightning war). The word "Blitz" (a bolt of lightning) was not used in German in its aerial-war aspect; it acquired an entirely new usage in English during World War II.
    In British English, 'blitz' is also used as a verb in a culinary context, to mean liquidise in a blender, a food processor or with a handheld blender stick.[citation needed]
    For the use of 'blitz' in American football, see Blitz (gridiron football); in rugby union, see Blitz defence; for other uses, see blitz.
  • hock (British only) – A German white wine. The word is derived from Hochheim am Main, a town in Germany.
  • nix – nothing; its use as a verb (reject, cancel) is not used in German; synonymous with eighty-six. From the German word 'nichts' (nothing).
  • Mox nix! – From the German phrase, Es macht nichts! Often used by U.S. service personnel to mean "It doesn't matter" or "It's not important".
  • strafe – In its sense of "to machine-gun troop assemblies and columns from the air", 'strafe' is an adaptation of the German verb strafen (to punish).
  • Stein/Beerstein -Meaning a large mug, ceramic or glass, typical at Oktoberfest celebrations. In German, this is actually called a "Krug". Some Krugs are called Steinkrugs, based on the ceramic material they're made from, but they are never called just "Steins".

(source)

"Nix" is especially interesting, because it becomes an English verb in its own right:

Etymology 1

From German nix, colloquial form of nichts (“nothing”). Compare also Dutch niks (“nothing”), informal for niets (“nothing”). More at naught.

Noun

nix (uncountable)

    1. (colloquial) Nothing. [from 1789]

Verb

nix (third-person singular simple present nixes, present participle nixing, simple past and past participle nixed)

    1. To make something become nothing; to reject or cancel. [from 1903]

Synonyms: cancel, reject

Nix the last order – the customer walked out.

(source)

"Nix" becomes even more fun when its Pig Latin variant, ixnay, is borrowed into common English:

Pig Latin version of nix; possibly the only Pig Latin phrase to enter common American English besides amscray and igpay. Ixnay and amscray were used widely in The Three Stooges shorts and The Flintstones episodes, possibly the main sources of popularity for the words.

(source)

Here's "nix" being used in the sense of "negate" in a comment on Language Log.

Here are two linguistic occurrences of "nix" in one Language Log comment.

"Nix" is also "a cross-platform package manager for Unix-like systems, and a tool to instantiate and manage those systems, invented in 2003 by Eelco Dolstra."  (source)

It all comes from nothing.

Neti, neti.

 

Selected readings

 

January 25, 2025 @ 5:12 pm · Filed by under Borrowing, Idioms, Negation


15 Comments »

  1. Jim M. said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 5:14 pm

    A typical usage of "mox nix" is in this song.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LX80iLMuo

  2. J.W. Brewer said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 6:29 pm

    I had already composed a comment with a link to an old song using "mox nix" when I realized that Jim M. had linked to the very same song. The song (and the phrase) are also interesting because we tend to think of knowledge of foreign languages among Americans as linked to social class and higher levels of formal education in the U.S. when one important feature of the Cold War era, in particular, was the lower-SES fellows who didn't go to college (and get the associated deferments) getting drafted into the Army and stationed overseas and thereby picking up some practical working knowledge of German or Korean or any of a number of other languages. I once met a fellow (no formal education past high school) who had spent his whole life living in the same county in rural east Montana except for the few years he had served in the U.S. Air Force. Who had sent him to a NATO airbase in the rugged terrain of northeastern Turkey, quite close to then then-Soviet border. Which meant that however much Turkish he'd forgotten 40 years later he still knew more functional Turkish than 99.99% of the US population.

  3. Victor Mair said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 6:36 pm

    Many thanks to Jim M. and J.W. Brewer for this precious information about everyday people learning foreign languages.

  4. GeorgeW said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 7:04 pm

    I think I remember this from the Katzenjammer comic strip from my youth in the mid-20th century. What I seen to remember was the expression 'mox no nix' meaning, 'it makes no difference.'

  5. cameron said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 7:55 pm

    In the film The Bowery (Raoul Walsh, 1933) Wallace Beery, playing Chuck Connors, performs in an 1890s Irish-inflected New York accent. In his very first scene, he speaks the immortal line "nix on the dicer. I takes care of that meself, poisonal": https://youtu.be/poKxc5GsC4w?t=228

  6. Allen W. Thrasher said,

    January 25, 2025 @ 8:22 pm

    The US military’s attitude towards enlisted men and foreign languages may have changed. A young man I know well was in the Marines, and prior to deployment to Afghanistan they had a number of enlisted men learning either Dari or Pushto. It wasn’t all of them, and I don’t know the percentage.

  7. Colin Watson said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 4:59 am

    I couldn't find a proper source for the etymology of Nix the package management software, but is there any reason to believe it actually has anything to do with the other senses here, beyond maybe a superficial coincidence of sound? It seems much more likely that its primary derivation is from Unix, which has an unrelated etymology (being a pun on Multics).

  8. Mark P said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 10:34 am

    My father served in Europe during WW 2 and was stationed there for a while before returning to the US. I remember as a small boy seeing some kind of publication titled “Mox Nix.” I remembered it as an unofficial publication, like a newspaper, but when I google all I can find is a book of cartoons named “Mox Nix”, so that’s apparently what I remember.

    I was born in 1950, so I wasn’t around for a few years after he returned, but I know that he picked up a few German words (Kartoffel, for example) while he was there, apparently through some Germans who worked for the Army.

  9. Victor Mair said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 1:10 pm

    My father was Austrian, and I distinctly remember hearing him say "Kartoffel". I loved to hear mein Vater say "Kartoffel", and the word sounded so beautiful the way he pronounced it. I had no idea whatsoever that it derived from Italian tartufulo ("truffle") < Lat. terrae tuber ("earth bulb"). I don't recall hearing him say "Erdapfel" ("earth apple"), which I gather is the usual modern Austrian word for "potato". "Erdapfel" must be a calque from French "pomme de terre" (also means "apple of the earth"). Even Persian took the calque route from French: سیب (“apple”) +‎ زمینی (“earthly, from earth”) for potato. Same for Hebrew: תפוח אדמה (tapúakh adamá). The reason European and Middle Eastern languages have calques upon calques for "potato" is that the plant is a new world crop, the indigenous name of which the Spanish picked up as patata from Caribbean Taino batata ("sweet potato"). When we cross the Pacific and go to China and Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia, etc. we also get makeshift names for "potato": e.g., "earth bean", "horse bell yam", "Jakarta tuber", "lesser yam", "western edible tuber", "edible tuber".

  10. Bybo said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 3:10 pm

    The imperative in contemporary German is, by the way, formed like this:

    maxtu + infinitive

    At least among married couples.

  11. katarina said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 3:12 pm

    I always wondered about the English words "fresh" (impudent)
    like in "Don't be fresh !" and "bloody", as in "bloody awful experience", "took your bloody time", showing annoyance, displeasure. Never looked up the dictionary because I knew the words "fresh" (like in "fresh food") and "bloody" (smeared with blood, and so on).

    Then discovered _fresch_ in German meant "impudent".
    But does the swear word "bloody" come from
    German _blöde_ "stupid" ? Asked Google and it said the origin of
    "bloody" as a word of emphasis or annoyance is uncertain.

  12. Christian Weisgerber said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 4:05 pm

    "Stein" for a beer mug is used regionally in German. The claim that it is pseudo-German is itself a myth.

  13. Philip Taylor said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 5:00 pm

    Katarina, the OED has some interesting things to say on the etymology of "bloody" —

    bloody, adj., n., & adv. meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary
    Summary
    A word inherited from Germanic.
    Cognate with Old Frisian blōdich, Middle Dutch bloedich (Dutch bloedig), Old Saxon blōdag, blōdig (Middle Low German blōdig), Old High German bluotag, bluotīg (Middle High German bluotec, German blutig), Old Icelandic blóðugr, blóðigr, Old Swedish blodhogher (Swedish blodig), Old Danish blothug (Danish blodig) < the Germanic base of blood n. + the Germanic base of ‑y suffix1.
    Notes
    The origin of the intensifying use of the adjective (sense A.8) and adverb (sense C.2) is uncertain and disputed.
    It has been suggested that this usage derives from oaths referring to the blood of Christ (compare Christ's blood!, God's blood! at blood n. I.6, 'Sblood n.), although this seems unlikely given firstly that none of these interjections is recorded in intensive use themselves, and secondly that a functional shift from interjection to intensifier would be highly unusual. (Although compare woundy adv., woundy adj.2) Similar difficulties are encountered by the suggestion that bloody shows either a reduced form of, or a euphemistic alteration of, byrlady int. (see quot. 1711 at waistcoat n. 1b for an example that is often said to show this, but apparently without any early textual authority).
    It has been argued that intensifying use originated with the phrase bloody drunk, which provides the earliest evidence of adverbial use of bloody in this use (compare quot. 1676 at sense C.2a) and is relatively common in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Various attempts have been made to explain this phrase, including derivation from blood n. IV.15a, with allusion to the drinking habits of aristocratic rowdies of the 17th cent., a formation which would be comparable to drunk (also merry, tipsy) as a lord at lord n. & int. Phrases P.3d, although no parallel phrase with blood n. is attested to support this hypothesis. Alternatively, it has been suggested that bloody drunk reflects attitudes to the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation (which dictates that consecrated wine is substantially transformed into the blood of Christ in the Eucharist) and the drinking habits of priests during the Reformation: see further S. Biscetti in Eng. Hist. Linguistics 2006 (2008) vol. II. 53–74. Compare the following earlier use of bloody drunk in the literal sense ‘drunk on blood’, with reference to the persecution of heretics by Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London under Mary I, who was known from at least the mid 16th cent. as ‘Bloody Bonner’ (see 1563 at sense A.4a) and is characterized in this text as a rapacious wolf:

    1569

    Not drunk wt wine..But bloody drunk sith hee not one, did spare of Christes sheep.

    T. Knell, Epit. Boner sig. A.iiij

    The word bloody does seem to be used especially often in this period with derogatory reference to Catholic individuals, practices, and beliefs, and it seems likely that this may in part reflect association with (and aversion to) the doctrine of transubstantiation among Protestants.
    However, the adjective is attested a century before the adverb as an intensifier (sense A.8), which would appear to suggest the following different course of development.
    The collocation bloody whore in quot. c1540 at sense A.8a.i may echo use of this phrase with reference to the Whore of Babylon (where literal bloodshed is clearly alluded to: compare Revelation 17:6, 18:24), although there is no implication of literal bloodshed in the use in this quot. (see also quot. 1545 at sense A.4a). In many cases in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, especially where the adjective modifies a derogatory word for a person (e.g. bloody villain, bloody murderer, bloody thief, etc.), it is unclear whether bloody refers to real blood, bloodshed, or bloodthirstiness, or is an intensifier. It seems likely that the intensifying uses of bloody arose from semantic bleaching in formations of this type. Compare, with similar semantic development, Middle French sanglant covered with blood (c1100 in Old French), hateful, despicable, (as an extreme intensifier and pejorative) accursed, damned (both mid 14th cent.; also 15th cent. in various imprecatory formulae).

  14. DCBob said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 5:58 pm

    I rather doubt that "mox nix" came into English only through WWII-era GIs. I'm pretty sure it's common in Amish country, and my father grew up using it in Claveland, Ohio. (His maternal grandparents were German, so that may have influenced his usage.)

  15. Andrew Usher said,

    January 26, 2025 @ 8:59 pm

    I remember a previous disci=ussion on "mox nix" in which (I suppose) a German speaker insisted that it must be in German "Das macht nichts" and never "Es macht nichts", and that the /s/ at the end of English 'mox' is spurious. If so, it's unlikely to have originated more than once, and surely the WW2 connection is too well-attested to be made up. But despite this protest I still suspect that there are or have been some dialects, if no longer standard, that could say "Macht's [= Es macht] nichts. If the previous anecdote is truee, I'd suppose that almost must be, because "macht nichts", without the S, would be heard rather as 'mock nix' than 'mox nix' in American phonetics.

    k_over_hbarc at yahoo dot com

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