Got My Mojo Workin'

I Got My Mojo Working

Muddy Waters

Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you
Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you
I wanna love you so bad till I don't know what to do

I'm going down to Louisiana to get me a mojo hand

I'm going down to Louisiana to get me a mojo hand
I'm gonna have all you women right here at my command

Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you
Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you
I wanna love you so bad till I don't know what to do

I got a gypsy woman givin' me advice
I got a gypsy woman givin' me advice
I got some red hot tips I got to keep on ice

Got my mojo working
Got my mojo working
Got my mojo working
.....
But it - uh uh - just won't work on you

Rubric for the Day [RotD]

HAVANA - FEBRUARY 20: The moon is seen almost fully eclipsed as it passes through the Earth's shadow

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Fragment on Dissembling
By Lucie Brock Broido

Curious in your dark
Frock-coat, do everything
That you have to,
If it is time;
Leave nothing
Still unsaid.
Once, to make of nothing
Something, was divine.
To have made
Of something
Nothing, was sublime.

The first form was to find a mare’s nest, to imagine that one has found something wonderful that turns out not to be real. It’s first recorded in a play in 1576. A typical usage is in Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands of 1903: “To accept the suggestion we must declare the whole quest a mare’s nest from beginning to end; the attempt on Davies a delusion of his own fancy, the whole structure we had built on it, baseless.”

It’s one variation on a set of phrases that were around centuries ago. Another version was horse’s nest, which was at one time also a dialect term for an idle tale or an oft-told story, one therefore over-elaborated and unbelievable. Other variations that have been recorded include salmon’s nest, and skate’s nest. For some reason, mare’s nest conquered the opposition and became standard. There’s a lovely enlargement of it in the 1811 edition of Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: “He has found a mare’s nest, and is laughing at the eggs; said of one who laughs without any apparent cause.”

The modern sense wasn’t recorded in the First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the entry for which was compiled in 1904, suggesting that it was then uncommon. The untidiness sense began to appear regularly in print only in the 1930s but was common by the 1940s. How the one sense changed into the other isn’t altogether obvious. A progression through illusion to misconception to confusion to muddle to extreme untidiness seems to have occurred. It may be that it was influenced by rat’s nest, a byword for untidiness that’s older than the modern sense of mare’s nest.

Got My Mojo Workin'

I Got My Mojo Working

Muddy Waters

Rubric for the Day [RotD]

Ceterum censeo sic esse legendum