Mimeograph is a word of memories, although of course that’s relative. Most people born after about 1980 probably don’t remember mimeographs at all. For me, though, there’s a family connection.
Long ago when I was very young (I’ll just say I kept hearing the word “Watergate” on TV and assumed it must be about a lake or river or some dam thing), my dad had a desktop-size metal machine roughly the shape of a very wide snail, with a drum in the hump and a crank handle on the side. When you had done all the necessary preparation, you could turn the handle and, with a “queeeeduck” sound, it would knock off page after page of the same document in fat bluish ink with a distinct damp vaguely tangy chemical smell. This was what is sometimes called a mimeograph – though technically this one was actually a spirit duplicator, commonly called a ditto machine.
Such machines were common enough; most schools had one or more. It was very cost efficient, especially at a time when a library Xerox machine might charge you 25 cents per page, which could also buy you a bottle of Coke. (The choice between a Xerox and a Coke wasn’t an easy one for me: I liked Coke, and could remind myself that I was helping pay my mother’s uncle, who was an executive VP for Coca-Cola, but I also liked copying pages from library books.)
A mimeograph machine couldn’t copy pages from books, mind you. It wasn’t made for making one copy by light (a photocopy); it was made for printing multiple copies imitating a custom-created original – mimeo, from Classical Greek μῖμος ‘imitation’ and ‘actor’ (also the source of our words mime and mimic), and graph, from Classical Greek γράφος ‘writer’ (from γρᾰ́φω ‘I write’). So it was good for handouts and tests and such things.
Of course the Classical Greeks didn’t have mimeographs. Though its parts are ancient, the word, like what it names, is relatively modern. The technology was patented in 1880 by Thomas Edison, and the name mimeograph was confected circa 1887 by the man who licensed the patent: A.B. Dick. You may have seen his name on some office equipment.
And a ditto machine was a mimic of the same concept – the spirit duplicator was invented in Germany in 1923. The name ditto is from an American producer of such machines, the Ditto Corporation, which in turn took its name from a word that had already been in English for centuries meaning what we still use it to mean: ‘My sentiment is the same as the one just expressed.’ It comes from a past-tense form of Italian dire, ‘say’ – so ditto means ‘said’, or ‘what was said’. Using a ditto machine is easier than retyping new originals, and, as we have seen in popular culture, saying “Ditto!” is easier than producing an original type of thought. Ditto is also a name of a Pokémon character that can mimic other characters, as well as of the young boy (twin brother of Dot) in the Mort Walker and Dik Browne comic strip Hi and Lois.
Ditto Corporation weren’t the only people making spirit duplicators; among others, A.B. Dick did, too (so they knocked off their own knock-off). I’m not sure which brand the one my father owned was. I’m also not sure whether it had been passed down to him, but making reproductions did run in the family; my father’s father was an amateur printer and amateur genealogist. I have a small family genealogy booklet that he made; however, it was clearly printed by a letterpress (rather than unclearly by a mimeograph or ditto).
But my family genealogy does have an A.B. Dick connection. On the page about my father’s mother’s family history, it mentions that her mother (i.e., my father’s grandmother) was the daughter of the holder of the first patent on the A.B. Dick Automatic Mailing Machine. Strangely, though, the little book identifies this great-great-grandfather of mine as one Reverend Alexander Dick, whereas the founder of the A.B. Dick company was Albert Blake Dick. So this is relatively unclear: I don’t know if it’s a copying error, or just another mimic, knock-off, or duplicate spirit.
Sesquiotica 