Typical pedantry

“How typical !” we may exclaim when someone does something that we think is stupid - the government, a fussy head teacher, an incompetent do-it-yourselfer, a difficult aunt.

It is surprising what a poor job of explaining the words ‘type’ and ‘typical’ many dictionaries make. We may want to know why ‘typical’ seems to mean ‘the silly way a person behaves’; why we can talk of a posh type or a difficult type or indeed a pedantic type; and why we use the word ‘type’ as a verb to describe using the keyboard of a computer.

As so often, there has been a sort of long semantic evolution: a simple term becomes applied to something else, by a ‘transfer of meaning’. Then one or other of the meanings may be used as a metaphor, signifying something else again. The new metaphorical use may itself become ‘transferred’, and any of these uses may in time spawn new transferred or metaphorical meanings - and so the process rolls on. Meanwhile the original meaning may well be forgotten.

The ancient Greeks had a verb tupto* meaning to bash, hit or strike; and a noun tupos* meaning a hit or blow. The Greeks themselves then transferred the meaning to the mark left by a blow - a pattern, say, impressed with a tool on to the soft clay of a pot before firing; and then even to the tool which impressed it. They made coins or medals by hammering a hard metal die on to a softer metal disc. Tupos could mean the die itself, or the resulting coin, or the very blow with which the die formed the coin. If they had butter pats then (and even we don’t seem to use them now, though I bought a pair a few years ago for old times’ sake) then each little ball of butter that bears the patterning of the wooden butter pats might have been considered a tupos, as well as the butter pat itself , and the gentle ‘patting’ by which the pattern is impressed on the butter.

* Greek ‘u’ was transcribed ‘y’ by the Romans, from whose language we adopted the spellings of 'type' and 'typical'.

It was centuries - if not millennia - later that the first European inventors of printing (Gutenburg and Caxton and Co) invented what became known as ‘movable type’: each line of each page of a book was assembled letter by letter, by hand. But first the letters had to be made by pouring molten lead into a matrix which itself was ‘struck’ by a hand-cut die. This principle had been used for centuries in making coins and medals - the typus of the Romans, who borrowed the word from the tupos of the Greeks.

Thus in the later fourteenth century we got books printed by ‘type’. And when five hundred years later Pastor Malling Hansen of Denmark invented a machine with which a person could write a letter by pressing keys on a keyboard, our English forebears named it a ‘typewriter’. The Victorians would ‘typewrite’ a letter, and a for a while a secretary who did this job for an employer was called a ‘typewriter’, because by then the word 'type' meant not only the die etc, but also the printed text. It was only later that the term ‘typewriter’ became used for the machine only, while the operator became a ‘typist’.

And a mere four or so generations later on we have almost forgotten the typewriter, but still use the same pattern of letters on a keyboard to create text on our computer screen - sorry, I mean ‘monitor’ - and are happy to refer to the process as typing.

It’s because the use of a tupos or type enabled the mass production of large numbers of an image, that the word got its metaphorical meaning of ‘one of many identical units’. We like to imagine that all professors come from the same mould, as it were, (absent-minded), or all clergymen (with a special way of talking), or all army officers (brusque and moustached): they are all - for the purposes of funny anecdotes and sketch shows, anyway - ‘types’. “There was a Scotsman, an Irishman and an Englishman, see . . .” And actors and actresses who find them selves having to portray the same kind of character over and over again, become ‘type-cast’.

Thus the remote cousins of the Tupos family proliferate, but tend to lose touch with one another until a Word Genealogist re-unites them.

Typical pedantry