Mickey Mouse as a Pejorative

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, yes, how are you?

My name is Timothy Wong, and hi, yes.

Well, great to have you, Timothy. What’s up?

Thank you.

Yeah, I’m calling because I was with a friend a couple nights ago, and it is going to sound weird, but I have a player piano.

And I was talking about how when I originally bought the player piano, it wasn’t working, and I wanted to get it working, but I didn’t want to have it redone professionally.

So I was just going to Mickey Mouse the job and get it to work.

And he looked at me and made a really weird face about the word Mickey Mouse.

And he started making fun of me.

And I explained that my grampy was an electrician, and he used to say that term all the time when he would just get something to work unofficially.

And he said I was using the term wrong.

He said you were using it wrong.

How would he have used to Mickey Mouse something?

He was saying that it didn’t exist at all.

And I explained to him that it was a term for unofficially fixing something, I guess.

I don’t know if that’s correct.

So Mickey Mouse is a verb?

I Mickey Mouse’d it?

I guess.

I don’t know.

Have I been doing it wrong my whole life?

Kind of jerry-rigging, right?

I guess I Mickey Mouse’d a job, or the job’s a Mickey Mouse job.

-huh.

Your friend is wrong.

I guess that’s the best word to use.

In a word.

Mickey Mouse is an adjective and a verb to mean something less than good.

It has been around for a long time.

And I know that’s a really broad definition, but in the slang world, it has gone a bunch of different ways since Mickey Mouse first appeared in 1928.

By the 1930s, late 1930s, we find it popping up in jazz to mean really kind of crummy music like you might find in a cartoon because jazz musicians kind of look down on the music that was used in the cartoons.

And you also see it pop up by the 1940s to just refer to a timid person or a foolish person, somebody who is like not worthy of your respect.

And all of this comes back to either the way the cartoons were made or the type of activities that Mickey Mouse himself got up to.

And this is really relevant to your condition.

If you watch those old comic shorts, what you’ll find is Mickey Mouse does like the impossible.

He does these things with cartoon physics and these things with cartoon situations that could not happen in real life.

He cobbles stuff together. It’s very kludgy. It’s a Rube Goldbergian, so to speak.

It’s just kind of ridiculous what he tries to do.

It’s not until much later, when Mickey Mouse kind of was an established figure in the comic world, that he became more of like an ordinary character who wasn’t so foolish and nonsensical.

And much later, Mickey Mouse becomes this almost revered figure of common sense, and it loses almost all of his foolishness.

But in the beginning, he was not all there, so to speak.

Okay.

Yeah, so you’re right.

And the great thing is, like, you can tell your friend, we have a solid 80 or 90 years of history of the verb being used very similar to the way that you used it.

That’s a long time, yeah.

And I love that you used it in a musical context, and also it pops up really strongly in jazz to refer to it as like a Mickey Mouse music was just kind of like not good, done by people who weren’t very professional or not very skilled or for the lowest amount of money and the least amount of time, that sort of thing.

Yeah, I think of classes that have Mickey Mouse coursework.

You know, people complaining that, oh, it’s just a Mickey Mouse course.

You know, I’m just having to do this stuff basically to complete the course, but there’s no creativity involved.

It’s just like.

Yeah, so the verb and the adjective both have kind of spread out on this big tree of slang where Mickey Mouse has taken a wide variety of derogatory meanings.

And yours is just one of them.

Oh, wow.

Okay, that’s fascinating.

Yeah, right?

Well, there you go, Timothy.

Take that to your friend and say nanny, nanny, boo, boo.

I’m going to.

I’m really excited that I was using it right and I wasn’t wrong.

That’s embarrassing.

All right.

Take care, dude.

You as well.

Have a good day.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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