stock character

Previously we’ve explored how the business and technology of the printed word leaves linguistic fossils but we found ourselves rather dumb-struck over this bit of etymology and extended sense in the rather non-intuitive term stereotype, which like its French equivalent cliché, is derived from the trade and describes dabbed printing from a duplicate plate instead of the original. Both words quickly moved from specialist jargon to common parlance as a way to express platitude, generalisation and bias. The στερεός incidentally does not convey in its original sense anything two-channelled, binocular or immersive but rather something firm or solid and three-dimensional whereas a stereotypical person if pretty one-dimensional.