Word.ws English Dictionary

mimic men

mimic men noun: post-colonial people that, through lack of ready alternatives, imitate practices of the pre-independence colonising people, maybe inappropriately. Also the plural of mimic man.

Noun

mimic men

  1. (collective) Post-colonial people that, through lack of ready alternatives, imitate practices of the pre-independence colonising people, maybe inappropriately.
    • We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new.1967, V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men, Paperback edition, London: Penguin, published 1969, →ISBN, page 146
    • ...even though in Trinidad and Tobago the steel band and calypso have emerged, nevertheless artistic, community and individual values are not for the most part authentic but, to borrow the language of the economist, possess a high import content, the vehicles of import being the educational system...1970, Eric Williams, “29 The Future of the Caribbean”, in From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean - 1492–1969, Vintage Books, published 1984, →ISBN, page 502

Also used as

mimic men is also the plural of mimic man.

Examples of mimic men in a sentence

  • Naipaul’s description of West Indians as ‘mimic men’ is harsh, but true.1970, Eric Williams, “29 The Future of the Caribbean”, in From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean - 1492–1969, Vintage Books...
  • It would also suggest that a ’mimic men’ attitude to addressing CO₂ capture and reuse, which first focusses on capturing low-purity flue-gas CO₂ emissions at the PLIE, would be probably misguided2023, Thérèse G. Lee Chan and David A. Janes, “Uncovering and Filtering Industrial Symbiosis Networks for Carbon Dioxide Utilization in...

Origin of mimic men

Coined by Trinidadian-British writer V. S. Naipaul in 1967 in his book The Mimic Men from mimic and men.

Questions about mimic men

What does mimic men mean?
Mimic men means post-colonial people that, through lack of ready alternatives, imitate practices of the pre-independence colonising people, maybe inappropriately.
How do you use mimic men in a sentence?
Naipaul’s description of West Indians as ‘mimic men’ is harsh, but true.
What part of speech is mimic men?
Mimic men is a noun.

Words near mimic men in the dictionary

  1. mimic function
  2. mimic functions
  3. mimic glass lizard
  4. mimic glass lizards
  5. mimic man
  6. mimic men
  7. mimic octopi
  8. mimic octopus
  9. mimic octopuses
  10. mimic thrush
  11. mimicability

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mimic men (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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