While reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Sidney from Indianapolis, Indiana, stumbled across the use of the term stereotyped notice to denote a printed announcement of a meeting. It’s an example of this word’s earliest sense; stereotype originally referred to a type of metal printing block used to produce multiple copies. The French word for this kind of block is cliché, a word that may be imitative of the clicking sound made by such a device as it prints. Borrowed into English, cliché now refers to a word or phrase that is trite or hackneyed — in other words, something repeated multiple times. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Stereotype Origins and Meaning”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, this is Sydney. I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.
Hello, Sydney.
Sydney, welcome.
What can we do for you?
Thanks for having me.
Sure.
I was reading the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass a few weeks ago, which I know sounds kind of obscure, but anyway.
In it, he used the word stereotyped in a way that I had never heard before.
And I was wondering if the way he used it is connected to how we use it.
So his sentence, let me find it.
It says, straight away, a meeting was called among the colored people under the stereotyped notice, business of importance.
So he’s talking about like the newspaper.
So I just kind of wanted to know about that use of stereotyped and how we use it today, I guess.
Boy, what a great example of the old use of stereotype.
Right.
If I were still making dictionaries, I would choose that as a quote because it’s nicely put.
Yeah, it’s really great. The term stereotype as we use it today usually refers to a fixed idea that you have about somebody or a group, right?
Right.
Yeah. But this sounds like it’s referring literally to the origin of that sense of stereotype because stereotypes originally were a kind of printing tool.
You would just have a stereotype, which was one block, like a metal block that had the images or the letters on it, and you printed with that.
And stereotype comes to us via French, and it goes all the way back to Greek words, stereos, which means solid, and type, which refers to, or the term that gave us type, that refers to a dent or an imprint.
And so it’s a method of printing.
Oh, wow.
It’s a stereotype.
Yeah.
Just to be careful, it actually is relatively new.
It doesn’t predate movable type.
What it is is where you take the type and you cast it.
You cast a mold from that, and then you make a plate from that mold so that you can then reuse the type for other purposes.
And you’ve got this plate from the mold that you can continue to use to print from when you’re using your type for other things.
And what’s interesting, too, is that we also get from that same notion the idea of the word cliché,
Which comes from the French words that may have to do with the sound of that metal.
Right, cliquet or cliché, which is very similar sounds, meaning to click or make the noise.
Yeah.
Oh.
So we start out with the printing process, and people start to recognize the value of something that is identical
And then refer to other things that seem to be identical to something else
In a figurative sense or non-literal sense.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
So there’s like that connection that I was really looking forward to.
Oh, that’s so cool.
Well, Sydney, thank you so much for calling.
If you come across anything else in your reading, just let us know, all right?
Yeah, I definitely will.
Thank you guys so much.
All right.
Take care.
You too.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
