This weekend I visited Birmingham, England and learned about idiomatic expressions linked to printing presses in a stately home with generations of printing presses dating from the 1400s. Here are some. See if you know them and can guess their meanings.
Idioms
- Mind your p’s and q’s
- Hot off the press
- Stereotype
- Make a good impression
- Be a dab hand at something
- Upper case and lower case
- Out of sorts
- Cliché
Current meaning
- Be careful to be on your best behaviour (British) or pay close attention (US).
- The most up-to-date information.
- Assuming every person from a single group is the exact same.
- Do something that makes you memorable.
- To be skilled at something.
- Capital letters and small letters.
- Feeling a bit off, unwell or grumpy.
- Describes an overused expression.
Origin
- This was because it was easy to mix them up as you had to place them back to front.
- Newspapers used to be made by pouring molten lead into the printing block moulds.
- They made a mould of already set type, then cast whole metal plates of the page for reprinting later. It was expensive, but was worth it for a high level of demand.
- In British English, rare book dealers use this to refer to a print run.
- Printers used a “dab” to apply ink onto the letter blocks. They were given the title of “dab hand”.
- The type was kept in cases; one part tilted up with capital letters and another part flat with small type. The capital letters were higher than the smaller ones.
- A sort is an individually cast piece of type. This expression is for when the printer ran out of type in the middle of a job.
- This is the French word for stereotyping. Instead of casting whole plates from metal, the French would cast frequently used phrases in one block. The French verb means “to click”, which imitated the sound made when the metal struck to create stereotype plates.
Author: Carol Waites
Presentation/editing by Christina O’Shaughnessy
https://worldwidewriting.org/
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Carol Waites (PhD)
Email: carolswritingtips@gmail.com
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