Stereotype, cliché and out of sorts

Setting a page by hand, letter by letter, took a long time. If a page would need reprinting later, printers could take a mould of the finished type and cast the whole page as a single, solid metal plate. Then the loose letters could go back in their cases for the next job.

In English this plate was a stereotype, from the Greek stereos, solid. In French it was also called a cliché, a word thought to imitate the sharp click of the mould meeting the molten metal.

Both words drifted from metal into everyday speech. A plate prints the same thing over and over, without any variation. By the late 1800s, a cliché was a phrase repeated so often it had lost its freshness, and a stereotype was a fixed, unchanging form. In 1922 the writer Walter Lippmann used stereotype for the oversimplified pictures we carry in our heads about groups of people, the meaning most familiar today.

A single piece of type was called a sort. A printer who ran short of a letter in the middle of a job could not finish it, and was out of sorts. Some histories trace today’s meaning, feeling a bit off, to that frustrating moment. As with many phrase origins, it is a good story that is hard to prove.

Look closer: “Mind your p’s and q’s” is often linked to printers too, since lower-case p and q are easy to mix up in mirror-image metal type. Nobody is sure that is where it comes from.