Deconstructing "mee-mee"

Craig recently bought Isaac two vintage illustrations of trucks from Plan 59, "the Museum (and Gift Shop) of Mid-Century Illustration." (This is one of them.) He had the truck pictures framed and hung them on the wall of Isaac's room. It's hard to say which of them is more excited about this.

Isaac immediately wanted to add the truck pictures to his pre-sleep routine, which has grown somewhat since I last wrote about it in July. Now we say "good night" to the truck pictures after bidding farewell to the window and the fish mobile, but before the lamp and the poster of Marc Simont's The Stray Dog.

Isaac calls the truck pictures, both of which feature visible male drivers, "mee-mee." Despite his fascination with trucks, he doesn't have a separate word for trucks themselves. He still calls most vehicles, be they backhoes or bicycles, by the generic "da" -- except for buses which are "buh," and mail trucks which are "mai-ma." No, "mee-mee" is his word for man, although that's an over-simplification. For one, by "man" he means human -- he uses "mee-mee" to indicate the driver of his Playmobil dump truck, whose gender is ambiguous, and the three Fisher Price Little People who ride his school bus, two of whom are children, one female.

But Isaac never uses "mee-mee" to refer to photographs or to real-life people; note that all of these representations of people -- two illustrations and four dolls -- are fictional, not real. Photographs of men and real-life men don't currently have any word to represent them. (Unless they are Craig or, I suppose, letter carriers.) For that matter, non-vehicular fictional men don't have a word to describe them either -- Isaac only graces them with "mee-mee" if they've got a vehicle of some sort. Women and children are luckier. As we know, sometimes Isaac points at pictures of women who are not myself and calls them "mama." He also says "baby," mostly when it is appropriate (when he sees a drawing or a photograph of a baby or child) but sometimes when it is not (when he sees a photograph of Wolfgang Puck on a can of soup).

So, a more precise definition of "mee-mee":

• a fictional person closely associated with a vehicle
• a dyad of fictional person and vehicle (non-bus, non-postal service)