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