Location(s)

Tonight I heard a guy say they used a cliché to make a baseball bat.

I was watching a tour of BWP Bats (turn your volume down before clicking the link) in Brookville, PA. Beautiful Pennsylvania hardwoods were transformed into powerful baseball bats right before my eyes. The process was pretty much what you’d expect. Lots of saws, lathes, sanding, paint dipping. But near the end of the process, the guy giving the tour showed us how the company name gets printed on the bat. In an aside comment, he said the cliché contacts the bat and the name is printed.

What did he say? The "cliché" does what? Well, I just had to find out more about THAT!

I popped into the Museum of Printing. In the early days of printing, type was cast from hot, molten metal (actually, an alloy of lead, tin and antimony). A matrix, or block of soft metal, was struck with a letterpunch, leaving an impression of the letter in the matrix. The matrix was set in a mold, and the molten alloy poured into it. The metal hardened as it cooled, and the now solid metal removed from the mold, leaving a raised letter that was coated in ink and impressed on paper. It’s a very tedious and time consuming process. It was a monotype process, that is, it produced one typographic element at a time.

A Frenchman named Firmin Didot eventually figured out how to cast a whole page at once. Instead of molding one letter at a time, a mat of letters for an entire page was pressed into the matrix. The stereotype was born! Now the whole page could be printed over and over and over, virtually all identical.

In Didot’s native language, the word for stereotype is the onomatopoeic past participle of the verb, clicher, pronounced in French “cli-shay.” It seems that Monsieur Didot described the stereotype by the sound of the hot liquid metal as it splashed onto the cold mold – “cli-shay.” Today, the words cliché and stereotype both describe something, or someone, that has been duplicated or used so many times that its original power or novelty is lost. So, the first guy who complained that an umpire was “blind as a bat” got a big laugh, and maybe even a cheer from his fellow fans, but the 34 million guys who have said it since . . .