956. How did terms like "stereotype," "boilerplate," and "typecast" make the leap from specialist printing vocabulary to widespread figurative language? We trace the etymology of these and other expressions. Plus, the story of positive "anymore."
956. How did terms like "stereotype," "boilerplate," and "typecast" make the leap from specialist printing vocabulary to widespread figurative language? We trace the etymology of these and other expressions. Plus, the story of positive "anymore."
| Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/printing-terms/transcript
| Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates.
| Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475) or https://sayhi.chat/grammargirl
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social Media Links: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon.
by Glenn Fleishman
According to Glenn Fleishman, the author of our first segment, when you’re covered with ink, everything looks funny.
Like most industries and subcultures, the printing industry has a whole language spoken by nobody else. But also like other industries, sometimes words do leak out and expand their meanings into metaphors.
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Stick around because after we talk about fun and fascinating printing terms, we'll talk about an interesting phenomenon called the positive "anymore."
Today we're going to typecast you. The stereotype of word nerds being interested in escaped terminology is a cliché. But it’s a hard impression to shake. [So please] Don’t get out of sorts from the boilerplate “jokes”!
As you might have guessed, the lines you just heard are full of not-very-subtle wordplay that uses printing terms — most from the 19th century — that became adopted into everyday language during times of huge societal change. Two even made a journey from French into English not long after being coined. The terms are "typecast," "stereotype," "cliché," and "boilerplate"; “out of sorts” is a bonus, a far older term possibly from the same pot of molten lead alloy, while “impression” is thrown in for luck.
It’s not clear why printing terms slip so readily into English. It might be that writers and printers were once not as far apart as they are now, when legions of intermediaries stand between the word going down on paper or screen and appearing on the real or virtual page. The lines between printer, publisher, and bookseller were rather blurry starting shortly after Johann Gutenberg’s ostensible invention of the European form of movable type printing around 1450 C.E. Perhaps writers’ close association with the art of printing led to an easy reach to find familiar terms to fit new purposes.
In the 1800s in the United States, for example, authors often had the rights to buy the printing plates of their work after a publisher had produced a certain number of copies or printings — or out of bankruptcy, which was a frequent fate — and then the writer would hire a printer and become a publisher or bookseller themself. Herman Melville, perennially short of funds, once despaired in 1857 that he couldn’t afford to buy plates of his low-selling words from a defunct firm.
Walt Whitman was notably a printer before he developed his reputation as a poet. Being an ultimate ur-hipster, he printed the first edition of "Leaves of Grass" at the Brooklyn printing shop of a friend. They set the type together by hand and ran the press. Whitman memorialized his background in a poem, “A Font of Type,” in which he tries to stitch together imagery that assumes that his readers had a vague idea of some concrete items he references, including type sizes, which used names before the point system: nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, and long primer; and the “pallid slivers,” or tiny thin pieces of metal type used to set.
Whitman's generation saw a remarkable explosion in manufacturing through inventions and innovations. Suddenly, nearly everything made for personal and industrial consumption was far easier to produce in nearly endless supply by factories using motor-driven power (from water, steam, and electricity) coupled with dramatic improvements in casting metal parts. And printing was no exception, getting a big jolt exactly in the year 1800, with the introduction of the first press made entirely of cast iron, replacing centuries of more labor-intensive wood ones.
With so many multiples of material goods being created, people searched for new words to describe them metaphorically, and "stereotype" is one that dropped neatly into this role. Stereotyping may seem like a modern term, perhaps born in the 1950s out of a growth of awareness of how applying a template to people was nearly always harmful and patronizing and often bigoted! But it actually has a well-defined printing origin. Firmin Didot, part of a multi-generational family of French printers, introduced the term in French in 1795 in the introduction of a book of logarithms. He joined the Greek roots "στερεός" ("stereos") for "solid" and "τύπος" ("typos") for "impression" as "stereotypie" to describe a solid page of type cast from metal.
Such a word was needed because Didot was one of the first to create a method of making a solid printing plate in the late 1700s, despite experiments that dated back as long as two centuries. By Didot’s time at the turn of the 19th century, printers routinely began to take painstakingly handset pages of type, make a mold of the entire page, and then cast a plate. The solid plate kept precious, expensive pieces of type from wearing down, since the types were used just for moulding, and this process also gave printers a less expensive way to store pages that were ready to print.
The word "stereotypic" entered English as a technical term almost immediately after it was introduced in French, and then in 1800 we also got the verb form, "stereotyping." By the 1820s, stereotyping in printing plants was commonplace in England and the United States, and the word began to fall into general usage. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1824 people began using "stereotypic" figuratively, and in 1850 they started doing the same thing with the noun, "stereotype," as in "people are more complex than the stereotypes you see in the movies." In Jeffrey Makala’s new book "Publishing Plates," about the rise of stereotyping in printing in the United States, he notes how Henry David Thoreau started using the word "stereotype" as a metaphor as early as the 1840s and then repeatedly thereafter. (Thoreau had a printing connection, too: his family’s graphite mining business supplied a substance used in electrotyping, a way to make wax molds of objects or pages of type into copper-faced duplicates or plates.)
The French didn’t stop with just that one word. Later, the term "cliché" was adopted as a synonym for "stereotypie," supposedly onomatopoeic for the sound of a metal plate swishing onto paper: cliché, cliché, cliché." Didot and others didn't seem completely devoted to the term "cliché," though, and sometimes used the more mundane French term "des planches solides," which means “solid boards.” Nevertheless, Englishmen snatched up the term, first for printing in 1817, and then more generally in 1881, according to the OED. Today, "cliché" has come to mean a trite turn of phrase or notion: “Oh, you came to the cocktail party dressed like Holly Golightly. How cliché.”
Around the same time, printers invented boilerplates. In the early 1880s, companies started producing premade printing plates (say that fast five times! producing premade printing plates) that contained syndicated writing and other material. A newspaper could subscribe to or be paid to print this “boilerplate.” It makes sense that these were called plates, but why boiler plates? Well, there’s no clear origin, but one possible origin (or at least a myth) that pops up in newspaper archives is that the first company to offer these prefab stories in metal worked out of the same building as a literal boilerplate manufacturer: a company making the pieces of metal that formed steam boilers!
But whatever the precise origin, people soon started using "boilerplate" in an insulting way to describe clichéd or trite writing much like later generations might criticize “clichéd writing” as mimeographed or Xeroxed. The earliest example in the OED is from 1888 and disparagingly describes a long letter that is part of a politician's "boiler-plate campaign literature."
Finally, to be typecasted and to be out of sorts both come from printing — more specifically from metal printing types, the individual pieces of cast lead alloy that were used to typeset all printed material from the 1450s to the 1880s. At that point, the Linotype was invented, and began its march. From the 1880s to the 1980s, the old style — handset metal type, placed piece by tedious piece — underwent a rapid but long decline until much of the world moved away from the old letterpress or relief printing to a new method — offset lithography — that relied on flat surfaces and photographic exposure for newspapers, books, and other general purposes.
Gutenberg’s great invention — with some historical disputes over his role — was creating a way to cast huge numbers of nearly identical pieces of type. His Bible may have required 100,000 individually cast pieces of type, so you can imagine how much time printers spent typecasting — a job that was later often taken on by specialists called type founders. Repeatedly expecting someone to fill the same role—the kind of typecasting that now refers to actors who play the same kind of character over and over, such as the plucky best friend or the mafia hit man — well, that’s an easy hop in meaning, though it took until 1927 for the first printed use to appear.
These same metal printing types also give us the phrase "out of sorts" because a piece of type is known in the trade as a "sort" and being out of sorts could make you grumpy: if you had no more of the letter “e” in lowercase at the right type size in a font, you couldn't keep composing a document, book, or other matter! However, despite the OED reporting that “out of sorts” entered English in 1621, there’s only speculation that printing sorts and a general sense of being ill at ease are connected. So it may be a stretch, but it makes sense!
Now I found myself out of sorts, to your benefit, and hope you find yourself illuminated by this journey through presses and type.
That segment was by Glenn Fleishman, a typesetter, graphic designer, journalist, and print historian, currently at work on a book about the history of how newspaper comics make the journey from an artist into print, called “How Comics Were Made: A Visual History from the Drawing Board to the Printed Page,” that's due out in 2024. And of his many claims to fame, a small one related to today's segment is that he identified the earliest citation for the figurative use of the word "boiler-plate" that appears in the OED. The citation he found predated theirs by three years! Good job, Glenn.
by Neal Whitman
In July 1994, "The New Yorker" published a short piece by Jack Winter called “How I Met My Wife.” The story is a barrage of sentences like this one: “I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to….” Sentences like this one sound odd because the idioms in it are usually used in negative sentences; for example, "That’s nothing to sneeze at," or "The movie is OK, but it can’t hold a candle to the book."
Because of this restriction, linguists call words and phrases like these "negative polarity items." [But] Actually, that name’s not entirely correct, since negative polarity items can also occur in questions, like "Is that anything to sneeze at?" or in a few other constructions, such as "Few books can hold a candle to Pilkey’s 'Captain Underpants' series." Still, negative polarity items, or NPIs, is the name that has stuck.
[And] Not all NPIs are idioms. One of the most common negative polarity items in English is the word "any." You can say "I didn’t see any turtles," or "Do you have any gum?," or "Fewer people have any idea what goes on here," but sentences like "I saw any turtles," "She has any gum," and "Lots of people have any idea what goes on here," just don’t make sense.
However, there’s one negative polarity item in English that in some dialects has broken free of negations and questions. It’s the word "anymore." Just about every English speaker will accept "anymore" as a negative polarity item, in sentences like "I don’t love you anymore," or "Why don’t we ever go out anymore?"
On the other hand, most English speakers stumble over sentences like these:
• Kids grow up fast anymore.
• It’s always rainy anymore.
• Anymore, I do the cooking.
If those sentences sound fine to you, then your variety of English grammar allows what linguists call "positive anymore." If they don’t sound fine, then feel free to mentally replace "anymore" with "these days" or "nowadays."
Although it’s not a good idea to use the positive "anymore" in your formal writing, you should know that it’s not a grammar mistake; it’s a regionalism. The Oxford English Dictionary labels positive "anymore" as a feature of Irish English, and has its earliest citation from 1898 in Northern Ireland. It also tags positive "anymore" as colloquial American English, and according to the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project’s webpage on positive "anymore," positive "anymore" is most common in the Midwest. [And] There’s also a small pocket of positive "anymore" speakers in Arizona.
That segment was written by Neal Whitman, an independent writer and consultant specializing in language and grammar and a member of the Reynoldsburg, Ohio, school board. You can search for him by name on Facebook, or find him on his blog at literalminded.wordpress.com.
Finally, I have a familect story:
"Hi, Mignon. This is DJ from Atlanta, and I have a familect story for you. When it comes to dreams I think we're stuck with just two words, 'dream' and 'nightmare,' but nothing in between. This morning at 1am, I woke up from a funny dream and couldn't stop laughing. I don't even remember what the dream was about, but I kept having more funny thoughts that just snowballed. First, it was the dream, then it was how odd it would sound to hear me laughing in my bedroom. Wait, I live alone, which makes it impossibly funnier. Then on the way to the bathroom, I came up with the first draft familect, the word 'laughmare.' Long story short, we all know what a nightmare is: You wake up terrified and have to convince yourself that there's nothing to be afraid of. It was just a dream. Today, I decided that 'gigglemare' sounded much better. A gigglemare is the opposite. You wake up and laugh hysterically, and the only way to stop it is to let it lose steam or think of something very, very sad. I do hope your listeners can experience this at some point. I have no idea how or why it happened, but it was absolutely hilarious and a million times more fun than a scary nightmare. Keep up the great work. We love your podcast."
Thanks, DJ, and I'm glad you have such great dreams. If you want to share the story of your familect, your family dialect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. It’s in the show notes, and be sure to tell me the story behind your familect because that’s always the best part.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to audio engineer, Nathan Semes; marketing associate, Davina Tomlin; marketing assistant, Kamryn Lacey; director of podcasts, Brannan Goetschius; ad operations specialist, Morgan Christianson; and digital operations specialist, Holly Hutchings, whose first job was at Blockbuster Video.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.