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Did you know where the word cliché comes from?
Print used to be typeset with literal metal type - little metal squares with raised letters that would be inked and then pressed into paper. You’d take the type and set it in racks to build words and paragraphs.
Print used to be typeset with literal metal type - little metal squares with raised letters that would be inked and then pressed into paper. You’d take the type and set it in racks to build words and paragraphs.
(Oh, by the way, you’d take capital letters and small letters from cases of letters mounted above each other - so the former were ‘upper case’ and the latter ‘lower case’)
This was obviously all a bit laborious. If you wanted to reprint something you’d printed a while back you would have to reset all the type by hand. So to make a copy of a set page for later use you could cast it from a papier maché mould taken from the original
This copy - a metal casting of the whole page or a section - was called a stereotype, which we now use to mean a much-used character or idea that is conveniently copied from one context to another. But the fun thing is that when you click a stereotype into place it makes a noise
Hence ‘cliché’, the sound of a form of words being repeated for convenience. Isn’t that fun? So next time you read a Boris Johnson column you ought to be able to imagine hearing the stereotypes cliché-ing into place like an excited dolphin
