This may be old news to everyone so if it is, please disregard.
I did a search on the list for info on how mm got its name because I had run across a story that had the term "modest mouse" in it.
From what I gather, Isaac had read the phrase "modest mouse like people" somewhere.
Anyway this term is used in a story by Virginia Woolf called "The Mark on the Wall".
I've tried to print the story and provide a link but the message had been returned to me both times (to big). So, I've printed the paragraph with the reference below and provided the web address for the full story if anyone is interested.
"The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane....
l want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be
interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to
slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility,
or
obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from
the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me
catch hold of the first idea that passes.... Shakespeare.
. . . Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself
solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so
- A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down
through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand,
and people, looking in through the open door - for this scene is supposed
to take place on a summer's evening- But how dull this
is, this historical fiction! It doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could
hit
upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly
reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts,
and
very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured
people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own
praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself;
that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:"
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/woolf1.html
