Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Relating to, characteristic of, or exhibiting mimicry.
- adj. Of or relating to an imitation; imitative.
- adj. Using imitative means of representation: a mimetic dance.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Pertaining to mimicry or imitation; apt in mimicry; aping.
- Imitating; imitative. Specifically— In zoology and botany exhibiting mimicry; characterized by mimicry, as the flowers of certain orchids which resemble butterflies. See
mimicry , 3. - In mineralogy, approximating closely to — that is, imitating — other forms of a higher degree of symmetry. This characteristic usually results from twinning. For example, aragonite occurs in twin crystals which at first sight appear to be hexagonal in form. See pseudosymmetry and twin.
Wiktionary
- adj. Exhibiting mimesis
- n. Something mimetic or imitative.
- n. A type of mnemonic.
- n. A substance with similar pharmacological effects to another substance.
GNU Webster's 1913
- Apt to imitate; given to mimicry; imitative.
- Characterized by mimicry; -- applied to animals and plants
WordNet 3.0
- adj. exhibiting mimicry
- adj. characterized by or of the nature of or using mimesis
Etymologies
- Greek mīmētikos, from mīmēsis, mimicry; see mimesis.
Examples
“High mimetic is not a phase but a heroic register (and one we might well argue turns romance into epic and horror into tragedy).”
“It is never the case that a single hegemonic entity called capitalism enters new settings that simply succumb in mimetic fashion to the new order that is thus reproduced neatly and cleanly over these remote environments.”
Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier
“Low mimetic is likewise a non-heroic register, a register of realism in the representation of an individual’s relationship to society.”
“Kant also assumes that although our pleasure in beauty should be a response to the form of an object alone, fine art is paradigmatically mimetic, that is, has representational or semantic content (CPJ, §48, 5: 311).”
“But this does not in reality differ from the Aristotelian mimetic, which is concerned, not only with the real, but also with the possible.”
“Next time, I'm planning to investigate the notion of mimetic desire - unless there's anywhere else you'd rather visit first.”
“In English these are called mimetic words, or a mimesis, but who knows what that means anyway?”
“Some of the ads were the buildings themselves (it's called mimetic architecture).”
“I think you still need a word other than 'mimetic' for those.”
“I see your point, but I somehow doubt that it will be possible to wean SF academics off using "mimetic" to mean what they have been using it to mean for years.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘mimetic’.
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March 2012
panache, evanescent, erogenous, vestibule, malfeasance, lacuna, blithering, incubate, breech, tabernacle, pearly, upholstery and 79 more...
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Slam Fodder
Those words that will inevitable end up in a Slam Poem
feel free to challenge me!:)bumptious, gamekeeper, slamily, burbuliatorius, cryptomnesia, paradox, pulchritudinous, mimetic, anhedonia, skelf, rampike, furlough and 84 more...
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Literary critical terms
cathexis, catachresis, polyvocal, alterity, liminality, liminal, limn, erasure, metonymic, intertextual, intrapoetic, contradistinction and 66 more...
Louises I remembered the days when seeing someone move through the air like that would have been a thrilling shock, the days before we'd all seen it countless times in the movies. Modernity's mimetic inversion: you see the real and are struck by how much it looks like a tediously seamless special effect. From "The Last Werewolf" by Glen Duncan. Mar 6, 2012