There are so many terms and sayings that come from printing: getting the wrong end of the stick, typecasting, stereotyping, cliché, mind your p’s and q’s, etc…
@bsag There’s an even older reference for one of these apparently:
A misunderstanding or distortion, as in We ordered a “full quart” of rice, but the clerk got hold of the wrong end of the stick and sent us “four quarts” instead. This expression refers to a walking stick held upside down, which does not help a walker much. It originated in the 1400s as worse end of the staff and changed to the current wording only in the late 1800s. Also see short end of the stick.
Language is funny.
@todor Interesting! The one I know relates to the ‘stick’ that printers used to collect the type to make a line of text. If you got confused about which end was which mid-way, the text would be reversed.
@bsag Oh! Thanks, for explaining that! These expressions have lasted for centuries. I sometimes wonder how long “google” as a verb would last. It’s made its way into literature. Imagine someone reading a contemporary book today in 200 years. They’d be lost.
@todor It's fascinating isn't it? But just as the original context for printing terms has changed and they gone from concrete technical terms to metaphors for other things, I wonder whether terms like "google" will end up getting disconnected from their original context and come to mean "to aimlessly flit between subjects" or something like that?