Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – Mo & Mu

Friedrich Nietzsche, rocker of the mad walrus mo.

Mo

Definition: Month, Mustache, Moment, Homosexual and/or More.

I know what you’re thinking.  Those are abbreviations.  Abbreviations don’t count in Scrabble land.

Except they aren’t.  Month and Moment often are abbreviated as ‘mo.’ with a period.  But mindless repetition convinced numerous bookkeepers to skip the dot.  Here’s an enthralling example Oxford provides from 1836:

“25£ per mo: after Nov. 8th.”

Oxford and Webster don’t make moral judgement whether which words deserve to be in the dictionary.  If they did, do you think we’d end up with such classy entries as retweet, twerking‘ and ‘butt dial‘?  Their methods are simple: When a word in question reaches a critical mass of printings in media publications it needs to be documented and defined.  That way, when gentle granny isn’t certain about the meaning of the word manspreading, she can search for it in the dictionary and get scandalized.  Over time, enough people wrote ‘mo’ without a period for the little wooden word to become a real boy.  Except instead of achieving realness though honesty and courage, mo is a real word because accountants in the 19th century were too lazy to bother tapping their pen next to a couple of letters.

As for ‘mo means mustache’, it’s closer to slang.  But it’s a semi-slang word that’s been kicked around for over a century.  Here’s a quote from Spats’ Fact’ry printed in 1914, a book that I am willfully pretending is about an underground tap dancing fight club:

“She could never live with a ginger mo, she said.”

I guess if she had no other option, she could live with a regular ginger.  But the thought of tongue wrestling a ginger caterpillar was right out.

I’m going to walk past ‘mo’ meaning ‘homosexual’, since I’m pretty sure it’s most often intended as an insult and I have no desire to dig for citations in forum posts low enough to use the term.  As for ‘mo’ equals ‘more’, that’s often used as African American slang when a writer is aiming for either authenticity, abuse, or both depending on the context.  Interestingly, Oxford claims that ‘mo’ also meant ‘to a greater degree’ in Old English.  Maybe Biggie Smalls was ultimately working to return English to its roots.  Mo Money, Mo Problems, indeed.

In real life, mutants don’t melt your face with an optic blast. They melt your face invisibly by overwriting your DNA.

Mu

Definition #1: One of 24 letters of the Greek alphabet.  Our Roman letters share the capital letter ‘M’, though the lowercase letter in the Greek alphabet is spelled ‘μ’.  The Greek letters ‘Nu’, ‘Pi’ and ‘Xi’ also count as two letter words.  We’ll save this conversation for later.

Definition #2: A Chinese unit of measurement equal to approximately 50 kilometers, or 100 li.  See also, Li.

Definition #3: A marijuana cigarette.  There are plenty of references to mu as a synonym for reefer dating back to the Nineteen Thirties.  But whenever ‘mu’ meaning ‘blunt’ jumps into a sentence, it’s almost always mobbed by a crash of slang words for ganja that may be actual street names for the herb, or may simply be words police officers continuously told each other were street names for grass, that proof was created through repeated assertion.  ‘Fu’, ‘mezz’, ‘mootah’, ‘muggles’, ‘mohasky’, ‘moocah’, ‘Indian hay’, ‘loco weed’, ‘Mary Warner’, ‘bambalacha’, ‘tea’, and ‘blue sage’ are twelve more archaic synonyms for pot.  How many of these words were crafted by tokers messing with the fuzz is a question of considerable speculation.

Definition #4: Short for ‘mutator’, then later for enterobacteria phage mu, ‘mu’ is one of the first viruses to be observed causing genetic mutation through the use of transposable elements.  Stop.  Back up.  Let’s unbox that.

Inside the nucleus of most cells are DNA strands, operating as the cell’s blueprint.  Mu is a virus that attaches itself to the cell membranes of bacteria cells and feeds an invasive strand of DNA into the nucleus.   This viral DNA then finds a recombination site at the end of the host DNA, attaches itself to it,  and changes the nature of the bacteria cell into a mu producing factory.  Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Mu was originally discovered by Larry Taylor as he studied E. coli and how isolated colonies spread, only to instead find mu-tant viruses spreading throughout a number of his samples to an extent that could not be ignored.  The timing of Taylor’s discovery was fortuitous not only because it helped scientists field a more complete understanding of how a cell’s DNA effects it’s physical makeup, but also helped prove that DNA was not static; it could be altered, thus altering the cell.  Some of the early experiments with mu on maize eventually led to the production of genetically modified foods (and may soon lead to genetically modified humans.)  And an understanding of how mu spread and how to inhibit its growth became invaluable when the AIDS inducing virus, HIV, was discovered altering the genetic information of white blood cells in humans.

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Are you a logophile eager to learn more?  Why don’t you head on over to the Scrabble’s Two Letter Words Page?