Out of Sorts

[emagem]

I saw this at the end of the P and Q’s column. It’s an explanation of the origin of out of sorts which I don’t think is right.

Printing also gave us another expression. Individual letters were called “sorts,” and if you used up all you had of a given letter, you’d be upset, naturally, because you were “out of sorts.”

I am acquainted with a woman who maintains and operates antique printing presses. In the summer I had a chance to tour her workshop and she gave a different explanation. She showed me a very large piece of furniture much like an old library card catalog but with smaller drawers and said here are my sorts. She pulled one out and showed the individual letters inside, tiny little metal rectangles with a letter carved on the front. She explained that each row going across held a different letter of the alphabet or character and going down the drawers had the same letters and characters but in different fonts. What she referred to as sorts where the drawers and not the letters. It was usually the job of an apprentice to put all the letters back in their proper sorts at the end of the printing. Sometimes the apprentice would be careless and put the wrong font in a row. The letter would literally be out of its sort. When it was discovered the shop was out of sorts, each drawer would have to be sifted through individually and the letters return to their proper places. These were tiny pieces that from the back look identical and from the front are quite similar. It was a very time consuming and tedious task in a place where the work is already time consuming and tedious.

[bibliophage]

Welcome to the SDMB, emagem.

A link to the column you’re commenting on is appreciated. Providing one can be as simple as pasting the URL into your post, making sure to leave a blank space one either side of it. Like so: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_264.html

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Thanks for the story, emagem. The problem is that the history of the term doesn’t support it, so word experts have a different and more likely explanation.

World Wide Words

English idioms are often extremely puzzling and their origins are notoriously difficult to track down. So people invent all kinds of yarns to make sense of them.

The most common story about this phrase refers to the printer’s word sorts for the individual metal characters in his boxes of type, so called because they have been arranged, each into its own compartment, with all of one kind together. It would obviously be a substantial inconvenience if a printer were to run out of a sort during composition. The problem with this story is that the figurative expression out of sorts is recorded much earlier than the printers’ term; the first recorded use of it for printers’ type in the big Oxford English Dictionary is from as late as 1784, from Benjamin Franklin: “The founts, too, must be very scanty, or strangely out of sorts”. It would seem he was attaching an already well-known idiom to the printer’s trade, not the other way around.

…

The Latin original of our word sort was applied to a piece of wood that was used for drawing lots. … But sort soon evolved another meaning in English that related to rank, order, or class. It was used to describe people, especially their qualities or standing. There were once phrases such as of sort that implied high quality or rank. Others that we still use today, such as of your own sort, the right sort, or of all sorts, evolved out of the same idea.

It would seem out of sorts developed from this idea of quality (lack of it in this case), perhaps influenced by the other meaning of fate or one’s lot in life, so implying that fortune wasn’t smiling on one, or that all wasn’t well.

[John_W.Kennedy]

“Sorte” still means “luck”, “fate” in Italian. The transition was probably via one’s lot in life.

Then there’s the new meaning of “sort”, “to arrange in order”, which comes of the fact that putting punched cards into order was done using the same machine that was used to separate them into groups.