According to Glenn Fleischman, 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 in Yon Fog, Fog Fog, 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 cliche but it's a hard impression to shake so please

don't get out of sorts from our boilerplate jokes. As you may have guessed the

lines you just heard are full of not very subtle word play 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, cliche, 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 kind of blurry starting shortly after Johann Gutenberg's ostensible invention of the European form of movable type printing around 1450s, 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 themselves.

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