Cliché

Seth Godin on clichés (via bobulate):

In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a printing plate.

I never thought that cliché would have come from printing, but it makes perfect sense - when you see something that everyone says all the time, just pull the cliché and place it on the press! That said, thank God for desktop publishing where we don’t have to worry about that anymore.