Out of Sorts

Today we visited the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown.   There are many displays and buildings.  One leisurely walks around the lanes and visits the barn, the shops, the 'doctor's office', the apothacary, the church, etc.

One of our stops was to a small printing shop.  There a man in 18th century clothing was working on assorted print jobs, and he talked with us for a while about many of the words and phrases that have come into our language from the inside of the print shop, and specifically,  from the labor intensive work of typesetting, which is the way printing was done in olden days.   The metal plate letters are very tiny and have to be manually put in place on a board to construct words.

One of the phrases the printer told us about was 'minding your p's and q's'   I guess it is easy to make a mistake when picking those tiny letters out of their respective boxes and putting them in place, usually backward.   Lower case p's and q's look exactly the same and are easy to confuse.  The same is true of u's and n's.

Another interesting tidbit was about being 'out of sorts'.    A box or tray of "a" letters, or "r" letters, of "z" letters is called a sort.   Here is the way the printer described it:   For a typographer to be working on a job, say a wedding invitation, and to run out of sorts, or not to have any more "r's" is the most frustrating thing in the world!!  That frustration gets translated into "out of sorts",  which we still use in our language today, though typesetting went out long ago, thankfully!  It took hundreds of hours to set up one page of a book.

There were an assortment of domestic and agricultural tools and implements on display.  Gerry, of course, wanted to 'talk plows' with anyone who would listen.  

As for me,  I was just very grateful not to live in that century, but in the one I'm in.    If I had lived back then, I'd probably be out of sorts most of the time!