Screen shot from Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film Mean Streets in which Johnny Boy (played by Robert De Niro) asks, “What’s a mook?”
26 June 2023
Mook is a slang term for a person of low social status, especially a contemptible one, a fool or stupid person. Mook is often confused with moke, a racial slur, and therefore should used with care, if at all. The word’s history, however, takes us on a journey that includes Tennyson’s opinion of his critics, the clientele of nineteenth-century American prostitutes, and a classic Martin Scorsese film.
For many people the introduction to mook came with that film, Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film Mean Streets, in which it appears in the following exchange:
JOEY (George Memmoli): Alright, alright, we’re not gonna pay. We’re not paying.
JIMMY (Lenny Scaletta): But why? We just said we’re gonna have a drink.
JOEY: We’re not paying (pointing at JIMMY) because, because this guy is a fuckin’ mook.
JIMMY: But I didn't say nothin’.
JOEY: And we don't pay mooks!
JIMMY: A mook. I'm a mook?
JOEY: Yeah.
JIMMY: What's a mook?
JOHNNY BOY (Robert De Niro): Mook? What’s a mook?
TONY (David Proval): I don’t know.
JOHNNY BOY: What’s a mook?
JIMMY: You can't call me a mook.
JOEY: I can’t?
JIMMY: No.
(A fight breaks out.)
Because the term was unfamiliar to both the audience and the characters in the scene, many assumed that mook was coined for the film. But that’s not the case. It’s much older, but how much older and where it comes from is a question, but one for which we think we know the answer.
Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang have as a first citation for the slang term a piece by humorist S.J. Perelman that appeared in the 1 February 1930 issue of the magazine Judge:
Ever since Harvey Hoover’s autograph and scratch-pad sketches went under the hammer for $123,000 recently, smarties here and there have been burning to muscle in on the big dough. Autograph collectors and others of the same ilk (and a fine big ilk it is, to be sure, with simply HUGE antlers four feet from tip to tip) have been lurking through their Congressman’s waste-basket, waiting hungrily for his “John Hancock,” and even ordinary mooks like you and me have been stuffing their blotters and backs of envelopes in safe deposits for their posterity.
While we can’t be certain where mook comes from, it most likely comes from an older, originally British, dialectal term moke. That term appears as moak in a slang glossary appended to an 1839 report to the British House of Lords on Poverty, Mendicity and Crime. In that glossary moak is defined as a donkey and marked as a Romani term.
The application of the term for a donkey to a person appears in an 8 January 1856 letter Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to William Allingford. In a comment about Alfred Lord Tennyson’s reaction to criticism of his work, Rossetti writes:
One of his neverended stories was about an anonymous letter running thus (received since Maud came out)—“Sir, I used to worship you, but now I hate you. I loathe and detest you. You beast! So you've taken to imitating Longfellow. Yours in aversion, –––” and no name, says Alfred, scoring the table with an indignant thumb, and glaring round with suspended pipe, while his auditors look as sympathising as their view of the matter permits. He has an irreconcilable grudge against a poor moke of a fellow called Archer Gurney, who he swears must be the author of the letter, having treated him before to titbits something in the same taste.
Moke crosses the ocean by 1872, when it is recorded in Maximillian Schele De Vere’s Americanisms: The English of the New World. While it’s a good attestation of the term having arrived in America, we can discount the etymology he proposes:
Moke, possibly a remnant of the obsolete moky, which is related to “murky,” is used in New York to designate an old fogy or any old person, disrespectfully spoken to.
This and other American uses of moke to mean a contemptible person make it likely that the British term for a donkey is the source for Perelman’s and Scorsese’s later use of mook in the same sense.
But the use of mook is further complicated by conflation with the use of moke as a racial slur. This sense has a different origin than moke meaning fool or contemptible person. The racial slur appears in mid nineteenth century America and is apparently from mocha, a reference to brown skin. An item in the 7 September 1850 issue of the flash newspaper Life in Boston and New England Police Gazette reads:
Morals in this respectable region are looking up, decidedly. “Dusty Bob” informs us that on the corners of Ferry and Ann [s]treets there are two subterranean dens kept by white “gentlemen,” one of whom has just graduated from State Prison. These pits of pollution are of small size, yet they are every night densely crowded with “mokes,” (negroes) who hold unlimited intercourse with the wretched white prostitutes, four of whom inhabit one cellar, and five the other, all sleeping in one bed! It is also said that the “landladies” of these dens do not object to bestow their favors upon the dusky sons of Ethiopia. What a beautiful feature in the moral and physical aspect of the Athens of America!
“Dusty Bob” also intimates that Moll McQuade, alias “Bald Head Moll,” now lives in the brick house corner of Ann and Richmond streets, with Hen Dean, a darkey, and Angenette Piper, a white gal. “Togey M—n is her present accept lovyer[?], and they pile together in a small room, Moll deriving a small income from her intercourse with mokes, while Togey practices stone cutting. Well, this is a great country, sure!
Use of this racial slur continues through to today, and it is easily conflated with the other sense of moke and with mook, neither of which have racist origins. Still, the confusion among the terms makes the use of mook problematic, at best. And, while it is probably not what Scorsese intended when he wrote that scene for Mean Streets, the violent reaction to a white man being called a mook can be seen as him objecting to being equated with a Black man.
Sources:
Note: Both the OED and Green’s Dictionary of Slang misdate Rossetti’s letter, giving it a date of 25 November 1855. But the mistake is understandable. Rossetti began the letter in 1855 but was evidently interrupted and picked up the pen again in January 1856. The portion containing moke is not only dated later, but it also makes reference to publications appearing in the interval. Green’s, however, goes on to make several other errors. First it says that the citation of moke from the 1856 Letters by an Old Boy is from an American publication, but it is a British source. And it places the 1867 use by G.E. Clark in his Seven Years of a Sailor’s Life in the “fool” sense, while Clark clearly uses it as a racial slur.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. mook, n.1, moke, n.1, moke, n.2, mooch, n.1.
Letters by an Odd Boy. London: S.O. Beeton, 1866, 25. Google Books.
Miles, W.A. Poverty, Mendicity and Crime. London: Shaw and Sons, 1839, 164. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Morality in Ann Street.” Life in Boston and New England Police Gazette (Life in Boston and New York), 7 September 1850, 3/1. Readex: American Underworld: The Flash Press.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2002, s.v. mook, n., moke, n.2.
Schele De Vere, Maximillian. Americanisms: The English of the New World. New York: Charles Scribner, 1872, 617. Google Books.
Scorsese, Martin and Martin Mardik. Mean Streets (film). Martin Scorsese, dir. Warner Bros., 1973. YouTube.
Perelman, S.J. “Rare Bit of Coolidgeana Bobs Up; Quickly Bobs Down Again” (1930). Judge, 1 February 1930, 8. Archive.org.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vol. 1 of 4. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965, 282. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.
Wright, Joseph. The English Dialect Dictionary, vol. 4 of 6. Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1905, s.v. moke, sb., 145.
Photo credit: Martin Scorsese, 1973. Fair use of a single frame from the 1973 film Mean Streets to illustrate the topic under discussion.