Yes, Your Machoness

From "Jeepers, Rappers, Where'd You Get Those Arms and Torsos?", in today's New York Times (fabulous headline, by the way):

“The marketing of the images is so key now to so many different bottom lines,” [hip-hop historian Jeff] Chang said. “Not just the music industry, but a whole range of consumer products. Your body is your brand and you’ve got to maintain that image. The machoness and braggadoccio, that’s always been a part of hip-hop. What’s different at the highest levels of the money game in hip-hop is the size of it all.”

Machoness?

Jessica Stone Levy, straying slightly from her trademark-law beat, wrote in an e-mail:

Clearly it should have machismo instead, which would have been a lovely counterpart to braggadoccio, but I also read the word with a Yiddish accent, with the emphasis on the second syllable, and think it'd be a lovely way to describe a Jewish guy who's striving to be macho yet inevitably failing.

Or perhaps it should be pronounced with a guttural ch, to suggest a kinship with machetunim (pronounced, as Leo Rosten memorably put it, "mokh-eh-TU-nim, with a crumb-expelling kh, to rhyme with 'Bach attune him'"), that handy Yiddish word meaning "all of one's relations by marriage"--far more inclusive and less bureaucratic than in-laws.

"She's my second cousin once removed or my first cousin twice removed--oh, I don't know, she's just my machoness."

My own first impression was that machoness was a new member of the titled class: countess, duchess, marchioness, machoness. That feminine -ess suffix does take the cojones out of macho, though, doesn't it?

Update: Or do you think it's Scottish? "Aye, Angus MacHoness--now, there was a manly man."