[net.nlang] "Mickey Mouse" and "Ribbet"

das@ucla-cs.UUCP (12/31/85)

In article <804@rtech.UUCP> jeff@rtech.UUCP (Jeff Lichtman) writes:
>How about "Mickey Mouse"?  When used as an adjective, it means "cheap",
>"shoddy", "unprofessional".

There's been an observable evolution at UCLA in the term used to describe an
easy class, one in which it's trivial to get a good grade.  At some point in
the past, before my time, it was called a "Mickey Mouse class".  By the early
1970s, it would be called a "mickey".  Since the mid-seventies, it's been a
"mick".

On another topic, if you ask people (at least Americans) now to imitate the
sound a frog makes, you usually get the reply "Ribbet! Ribbet!".  My memory
is that this is not what people said in the early 1960s.  Am I right or wrong
on this?  I've always claimed that "Ribbet" was popularized by a sketch on the
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967 or 1968, in which Tommy Smothers played
a frog in a puppet theater.  Since everyone at school the next day was saying
"Ribbet! Ribbet!", it must have been because of the novelty, rather like the
way "Here come da judge!  Here come da judge!"  was on everyone's tongue the
day after Sammy Davis, Jr. did the lead-ins to the judge sketches on Laugh-In
one night.

For the net.games.trivia readers (and followup only to that group, please),
what other TV broadcasts have had bits or lines with such staying power?
"Here come da judge!" even inspired a song.  Note my criteria:  the causative
show must have been a single broadcast (so that rules out "Meathead!" from
All in the Family, since Archie used that in every episode, or "Take off, eh!"
from SCTV), seen by everyone at once (so that rules out "Make my day!" or other
movie phrases); the phrase or line must have been talked about by everyone the
next day, and there must have been some lasting effect (be it a few months,
like "Here come da judge!" or years and years, like "Ribbet!" (if my Ribbet
theory is correct)).

-- David Smallberg, das@locus.ucla.edu, {ihnp4,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!das