miche - From Ulster to America
Source: From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English
Author: Michael Montgomery
Comments: From Ulster to America recounts the lasting impact eighteenth-century settlers from Ulster have made on the development of the English language of the United States. The book documents over 500 vocabulary items contributed to American English by these ‘Scotch-Irish’ settlers. Each ‘shared’ term with its meaning is authenticated by quotations from both sides of the Atlantic. This searchable online version of his book takes its text from the dictionary part of the second edition published by the Ullans Press in 2017.
miche, meach, mich, mitch, mitche vb To play truant from school. [< Old French muchier ‘to hide; skulk, lurk’; oed miche vb 1a ‘to play truant’ 1580→, now dialectal]
Ulst.:
1880 Patterson Antrim/Down Glossary 68 = to play truant.
1921 Doyle Ulster Childhood 99 I loved the Spring ploughing, and ‘mitched’ from school many a Spring day to follow the plough.
c1955 Montgomery Heard in Ulster 82 = being absent from school without permission: ‘He was caught mitchin. He’s in for it’.
1964 Braidwood Ulster/Elizabethan English 103 All over Ireland schoolboys still mich. The original meaning of the word seems to be ‘to skulk, to lurk stealthily’, and explains the long-puzzling phrase in Hamlet, miching Malicho, ‘sneaking, skulking mischief’.
1983 Marshall Drumlister 105 Up in heaven do kiddies play, / Or go to school, or mitch, or run away?
U.S.:
1870 Notes 56 Genuine English of Shakespeare’s time … is the participle applied to the boy who played truant and good Scotch, we suppose, is the ‘scutching’ he received for his ‘miching’ … ‘Recess’ as we say now the young ‘micher’ of fifty years ago called ‘little noon’.
1944 Wilson Word-list 46 = to get around stealthily, to slink, to appear dishonest or shifty: ‘I seed a fellow meachin’ round up the cove like he might ’a’ been a revenuer’.
