Mim has a long history.  The earliest example in the Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk) is from the sixteenth century poem Dum Wyff: “The mimest wyff that euer tuik lyff Will ware sum wordis and start hir”.  And four hundred years later, Anna Blair in The Rowan on the Ridge (1980) says: “And over the following winter and spring Rab was tamed a little and Maggie weaned from some of her mim ways”.

Often meaning merely quiet and unassuming, mim was regularly used of women, in whom such characteristics were evidently to be desired.  So we read that “Maidens should be mim and meek, Swift to hear but slow to speak” from C I Johnstone’s Elizabeth de Bruce (1827), and the somewhat different  “Maidens should be mim till they’re married, and then they may burn kirks” from Andrew Henderson’s Scottish Proverbs (1832). 

There can also be a definite suggestion of affectedness in anyone described as mim, especially as regards speech.  Thus there is the compound mim-moued, meaning affectedly prim or demure in speech.  Burns refers to “Some mim-mou’d, pouther’d priestie” in the poem To W. Chalmers’ Sweetheart (1786).  And according to David Rorie in The Mining Folk of Fife, “Mim-mou’ed maidens never get a man; muckle-mou’ed maids get twa”.  

Affected speech was often equated with Englishness, as in this from George MacDonald’s Malcolm (1875): “Some of the rougher of the women despised the sweet outlandish speech she had brought with her from her native England, and accused her of mim-mou’dness, or an affected modesty in the use of words”. Finally, in  Galloway Gossip Sixty Years Ago, by ‘Saxon’ (1877) we read of someone who “…had turned horrid genteel and so was very mim-mouthed, and exceedingly careful to avoid all vulgar phrases likely to lead anyone to consider she was Scotch”.  Indeed.

Scots Word of the Week is written by Ann Ferguson of Scottish Language Dictionaries