People Are Just Realising Why We Call Them Uppercase And Lowercase Letters, And I Had No Idea

We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about how the “deserts” in “just deserts” is written like the arid landscape, said like the sweet treat, and has a completely separate meaning to both of them that’s older than the Taj Mahal. 

Well, now for another mind-melter ― there’s a very good reason why we call uppercase and lowercase letters what we do, and it’s because of the original printing presses. 

In a recent TikTok, linguist @etymologynerd shared that “the upper- and lower-case originally referred to actual drawers used by printing presses ― the more often-used letters were kept in the closer, or lower,” drawer of a compositor’s desk.

Huh!

Yep! In fact, the linguist shared that printing presses had far more of an impact on how we talk about keyboards than we probably realise. 

For instance, ”‘type’ used to mean ‘symbol’ or ‘emblem’, so these were literally ‘moveable symbols.’ And that’s why you ‘type’ on a keyboard.” 

Meanwhile, some of these symbols would show up together so often that you could get preset pairings on metal plates called “stereotypes” ― hence we get the phrase we know today.  

Even the clicking of the printing press as it made and remade hundreds of the same images led to the French term “cliche,” the creator shared (the word is French for click). 

In fact, Merriam-Webster explains that “The words cliché and stereotype have a good deal in common. Both come from French, both were originally printers’ terms, and both have come to take on somewhat negative meanings in modern use.” 

There’s a word for these types of words

Now-redundant terms or images that were once used to explain new tech to consumers are called “skeuomorphisms.” 

Other examples of these include floppy disk symbols to mean “save” on computers, scissor emblems for cutting and pasting on your PC, and even a notepad and pen emoji to indicate a Notes app. 

“People that criticise skeuomorphism say it’s pointless, but I say it isn’t. It increases your understanding of the product. Technology is getting so complicated that we’re going to have to find ways for people to understand what it can do without having to spell it out,” Matt Webb, owner of digital design company BERG, told the BBC.

People had thoughts about the news

“Like how we still say ‘hang up’ when we end a call. Or ‘rewind,’“a TikTok user commented under the video.

“I hope the ‘save’ icon stays a floppy disk 1,000 years into the future when floppy disks are a myth,” another said. 

Yet another commenter raised the question “Do Gen Z know what the ‘save’ icon represents?” and as a generational “cusper,” I have to confess I had no idea what it meant. I still don’t really know what a floppy disk is.

What scares ME, though, is the fact that Gen Alphas likely don’t know the play and skip buttons on their laptops come from CD players (time comes for all of us...).