mouse [OE] English mouse, Dutch muis, and German Maus share their ancient ancestor with Latin and Greek mus. The essential meaning of the word, that of a small rodent, has remained unchanged. See also muscle. The shared initial m sound, as well as differences of size and character, has prompted contrasts with *man. A person might mock another’s timidity by asking, ‘Are you a man or a mouse?’ [M16th] Robert Burns’s poem To a Mouse reminded people in 1786, as it does today, that ‘The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, / Gang aft agley’ (‘often go awry’). The computer mouse appeared in the 1960s and was so called from its small size and, in the original design, a cord suggesting the tail. A person who spent most of their time sitting using a computer or surfing the internet got the name mouse potato in the 1990s, in imitation of couch potato (see couch). People began setting mousetraps in the 15th century: before that the usual word was mousefall, still used in Scots dialect. The phrase a better mousetrap, ‘an improved version of a well-known article’, comes from an observation attributed to the US philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1889, though it is also claimed by Elbert Hubbard: ‘If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.’ Agatha Christie took The Mousetrap as the title for her most successful play, a murder mystery premiered in London in 1952, and still going strong as the longest continuously running play of all time. She took the title from Hamlet’s mockingly named play by the same title with which he traps his uncle.