Me, I’ve always thought it meant “the exact opposite”. But there I was watching Miami Ink, and this father and son come in for “mirror image” tattoos of their lucky number. “I want to us to get mirror image tattoos because he’s just like me; we’re similar in so many ways.” Hrm?? So Chris Nunez says, “One of you should get it on the right arm and the other on the left, and then it adds to the mirror image idea.”
So I think, “Sweet, if they stand together they will have the ‘reflection’ in the other’s arm.” But no, they proceed to get matching tattoos instead.
Of course a mirror will reverse an image, but if the image is symmetrical, the result is the same.
I am reminded of a classic Marx Brothers sketch where one brother walks past a ‘mirror’ and sees his double. Actually there is just an opening, and there is some very skilful acting by another brother, but the concept is as stated above.
To me it means identical but opposite. It came up a lot when we were viewing house plans. You could have the house built as it was shown in the plan, or get a mirror image, with everything just the same but totally reversed, as though there was a mirror between them.
I have never heard it used to mean merely identical.
To me mirror image is the same image but flip-flopped. Like in Ellen Cherry’s example of a house floor plan. House “A” would have garage on the left, entry on the right. House “B” would have garage on the right, entry on the left.
So in the tattoo example I would expect maybe the dad to have a dragon facing to the left and the son to have the exact same dragon but facing to the right.
My basic reaction to the term is the image you see in a mirror where left becomes right, but top remains top and bottom remains bottom.
Upthread “spitting image” is mentioned. Somewhere along the way I heard/read that that’s a corruption of “spirit and image” suggesting a copy or clone, but usually meaning that the son bears a striking resemblance to the father (substitute daughter and mother where applicable).
I’ve heard “That boy’s the image of his father” and “My son is so like me it’s as though I’m looking in a mirror” but I’ve never heard the two conflated.
To me, mirror image means ‘identical but opposite’.
I might use it to describe two real objects (i.e. not just one object and its reflection) that are similar, but opposite in configuration - such as each of a pair of butterfly wings, the floor layout of two houses built back to back, or a pair of bookends.
I wouldn’t use it to describe extreme similarity; for that, I would say “exact likeness”, “spitting image”, “dead spit” or some such
For some reason, this really tickles me. I think mirror image means the way an image would look in a mirror. The word “mirror” is what is tipping me off here.
The only example that comes to mind of figurative use would be if you had an evil twin (assuming that you yourself are good), which gets into the “same, and yet opposite” thing.
Actually, I might use it figuratively to describe a non-physical object, such as a set of instructions; a set of instructions consisting of the same steps in reverse order (or reversed direction of the individual steps) might be described as a mirror image of the first, but I still wouldn’t ever use the term without wanting to mean that some kind of reversal was in play.
