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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

Relatedly, see the etymology for "stereotype" and "cliche":

https://www.etymonline.com/word/stereotype

1798, "method of printing from a plate," from French stéréotype (adj.) "printed by means of a solid plate of type," from Greek stereos "solid" (see stereo-) + French type "type" (see type (n.)). Meaning "a stereotype plate" is from 1817. Meaning "image perpetuated without change" is first recorded 1850, from the verb in this sense.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/cliche

1825, "electrotype, stereotype," from French cliché, a technical word in printer's jargon for "stereotype block," noun use of past participle of clicher "to click" (18c.), supposedly echoic of the sound of a mold striking metal (compare native click).

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I think the explanation of stereotype needs a bit of explanation to make sense.

In early printing, a plate would be assembled from individual letters of type before it was used for printing. However, it quickly became apparent that certain words or phrases were used a lot, so typesetters would create "a solid plate of type" for those words or phrases to speed up the typesetting process.

no, this is talking about a solid page-sized plate of type, not phrase-sized plate of type

before the stereotype process, you printed from the individual letters of type, as people still do today for flyers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_%28printing%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterpress_printing

Nah, I think it refers to the fact that popular printing items, like the Bible or popular books that stayed in print more or less indefinitely would be stereotyped, that is an imprint of the pages would be taken, then a used as a mold to cast a plate that could be used while the type slugs could be re-used for something else.

A large part of the printing business was to print fill-in-the-blank business stationary, like orders, invoices, etc.

So a stereotype came to mean a standard form that you could adapt to whatever context by just changing a few details.

Indeed it may be surprising that "stereo sound" (and later analogues like "stereo vision") have nothing, etymologically, to do with having two channels; it was essentially introduced as a marketing term referring to the more "solid" or tangible sensory quality compared to single-channel sound.

I think stereo vision predates the usage in sound, and refers more to the 3D depth perception of shapes that it allows. Stereography was invented sometime in the mid 1800s [1]. Stereo sound similarly is meant to give a more realistic perception of sound in space compared to mono.

1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/sterographs-origin...

Oops, very good point. I forgot that stereograms were a thing already in the 1800s (being indeed a rather obvious application of photography).

nit: type actually originates from the Greek word τύπος https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/τύπος (Google definition‘s origin based on oxford dict also confirms that).

https://www.etymonline.com/word/type

it’s correctly attributed, just one hypertext layer deeper

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