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‘Mickey’ and ‘Geraham’

February 1, 2008

There’s this contractor in our project, an old man with white hair called Chong. His name is Chong, his namecard is Chong, and everyone calls him Chong, although most of his underlings call him ‘lou sai’ (boss).

But not my colleague – he calls the old man something that sounds like ‘Mien Jee’. His Chinese name isn’t anything close to that, and besides, Mien Jee sounds like a girl’s name (in fact my wife has a friend with that name).

So after about a year, i tak boleh tahan already and asked my colleague why ‘Mien Jee’. This was the explanation – Back in the early 80’s when they were working in another project, everyone called Chong ‘Mickey Mouse’ because:

a) He was thin and small;
b) He had big ears like aforementioned celebrity mouse.

So ‘Mickey Mouse’ became ‘Mickey’ and then to ‘Maggi Mee’ and somehow later Hokkienified to ‘Mien Jee’.

Mystery solved.

My old friend Raymond once told me this other one from his schooling days. There’s guy called Ding in his school whom everyone calls ‘geraham’. For those of you who packed up their Bahasa Malaysia 101 years ago,

gigi geraham = molar teeth.

What’s the connection? Well, poor Mr. Ding’s name was forever made fun of, one of it was ‘Ding Dong Bell’, etc. Kids can be mean. But anyway, ‘Ding Dong Bell’ somehow became ‘Alexander Graham Bell’ and then Graham became ‘geraham’.

One day i might tell you the story of why the girls in my school called me ‘hot stuff’… 🙂

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