During our class on Wednesday, Professor Rippeon went over some of the printing press nomenclature with us. He also explained that the expression “out of sorts” arises from being out of a particular kind of type. As it were, the printing press era gave rise to a number of commonly used idioms. I took the liberty of looking some up.
One such expression is “mind your p’s and q’s”. Because they could be so easily mistaken for one another, especially in a backwards or upside down orientation, type setters had to pay extra attention to ensure they were using the correct sort. In the conventional type case, they are also right next to one another.
The designations “uppercase” and “lowercase” also have their roots in printing. The large letters would be kept in a case high on a shelf, while the small letters would be below that. In that time, the “uppercase” and “lowercase” letters rested in their namesake locations.
A final expression is “hot off the press”, for reasons that are fairly obvious. I always find it interesting to learn the origins of common expressions; the printing press revolution had not shortage of these.
I also thought this was really cool, especially because I frequently do textual designs and have always seen the terms ‘leading’ and ‘kerning’ without knowing that they originated in typesetting. ‘Leading,’ as professor Rippeon explained, is the spacing between lines of text that is adjusted by placing lead spacers between the metal sorts. When my group did our typesetting, we used an italicized font and parts of the letter hung off the sides of the sort, which I thought was weird. It turns out that this is the origin of the term ‘kerning,’ which is the spacing between letters, because kern comes from carne, which means ‘projecting angle.’ Strangely these idioms have hung around in our language even when typesetting and printing presses have not. I find it interesting that the meaning of these idioms has now morphed so completely that even though their origins have pretty much been lost to our modern society, they still exist as meaningful phrases, albeit divorced from their original intentions.