This is not a Pin ?????

[magicbob]

My daughter traded for some pins on our recent trip that had cute phrases such as:

"Looking 4 [Mickey]'s"
"Wanna Trade?"
"Happy Trading!"

One of the pins says "This is not a Pin!" See image below.

I'm assuming there's a pun or inside joke involved, but I don't get it. Can someone enlighten me on what the meaning of that phrase is?

Thanks.

 

[stinkerbell]

These pins were part of the 2010 Hidden Mickey Series at WDW. Along with yours there were also:

"I only need one more" and "I (heart) Disney Pins"

You can find more info about them here: http://www.pinpics.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi

We sort of took them as a joke, "This is not a Pin" in particular. We wore them around our Friday pin trading night in St. Augustine and in the parks too for a while. They are cute and I was lucky enough to find authentic ones early on before they were being counterfeited. Right now there are tons of fake ones on cast lanyards at the parks.

 

[magicbob]

We sort of took them as a joke, "This is not a Pin" in particular.

I assumed it was a joke of some kind, but I thought maybe there was some "inside" meaning to the phrase that I wasn't aware of. Like when Animal Kingdom first opened and they used the "African" term "Natazu" (Not a Zoo). I keep trying to pronounce the phrase different ways to see if some hidden meaning emerges! Surely there's no connection to discount "pin" codes, right?

 

[PlasterCat]

The reference is to the late 1920s The Treachery of Images by René Magritte, where the text below a picture of a smoking pipe reads "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." which translates to "this is not a pipe."

Disney made a fairly clever play on a painting that was produced about 80 years prior to the pin's design, so the reference is a bit obscure.