SHANE’S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: “Mickey Mouse” without Mouseketeers simply doesn’t make sense.

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Welcome to another installment of SHANE’S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS, a regular Wednesday feature at NA Confidential.

Around this time each week, the anguished wails begin seeping out of the bunker’s ventilation ducts: Why all these newfangled words?

Why not the old, familiar, comforting words, the ones that sufficed during the glory days, in those simpler times, before inexplicably naked greed kicked in like a bond-issue-percentage speedball, knocking you back into the turnbuckles but feeling oh so fine, and now, as the Great Elongated and Exasperated Obfuscator of comic book series fame (can Disney World be far behind?) you teach detailed principles of banking to bankers, at least when not otherwise occupied making healthy deposits into your own account?

Thankfully, even if one toils for the Invincible and Triumphant Leader, a healthy vocabulary isn’t about intimidation through erudition. No, not at all. Rather, it’s about selecting the right word and using it correctly, whatever one’s pay grade or station in life.

Even municipal corporate attorneys reaping handsome remuneration to suppress information, squelch community dialogue and retrofit scarce affordable housing into luxury condos with a view of the Eiffel Tower, can benefit from this enlightening expansion of personal horizons, and really, as we contemplate CPIs, IUDs and IOUs, all we really have is time — and the opportunity to learn something, if we’re so inclined.

Really? It sounds like this attorney target of yours works for one hell of a Mickey Mouse organization.

Indeed, and the enduring but delicious irony of Mickey Mouse in the context of City Hall’s ruling elite is that when they look in the mirror, they see themselves as the inheritors of Walt Disney as the slickly successful multinational conglomerate image-churner, when in fact it’s that other definition that really matters.

mickey mouse

adjective, (often initial capital letters) Informal.

1. trite and commercially slick in character; corny: mickey mouse music.
2. useless, insignificant, or worthless: mickey mouse activities just to fill up one’s time.
3. trivial or petty: mickey mouse regulations.

Origin of mickey mouse

1930-35; after the animated cartoon character created by Walt Disney, orig. with reference to the banal dance-band music played as background to the cartoons

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