User:Ssstephen/typing

type

type (n.) https://www.etymonline.com/word/type

late 15c., "symbol, emblem," from Latin typus "figure, image, form, kind," from Greek typos "a blow, dent, impression, mark, effect of a blow; figure in relief, image, statue; anything wrought of metal or stone; general form, character; outline, sketch," from root of typtein "to strike, beat," from PIE *tup-, variant of root *(s)teu- (1) "to push, stick, knock, beat" (see steep (adj.)).

Extended 1713 to printing blocks of metal or wood with letters or characters carved on their faces, usually in relief, adapted for use in letterpress printing. The meaning "general form or character of some kind, class" is attested in English by 1843, though the corresponding words had that sense in Latin and Greek. To be (someone's) type "be the sort of person that person is attracted to" is recorded from 1934.

also from late 15c.

click click click

To type is to strike, or to beat. The piano is a percussion instrument. Type maybe comes from the same root as "steep" as in a slope. The use of the word type as a general form or class comes after the meaning from metal type printing. The verb "type" , "to write with a typewriter," arrived in 1888; see type (n.). Earlier it meant "to symbolize, typify" (1836) and "to foreshadow" (1590s). Related: Typed; typing.

typewriter

in the mechanical sense, 1868, from type (n.) + writer. Related: Type-write (v.) "print by means of a typewriter;" type-written (1882). Slang office-piano "typewriter" is by 1942.

It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work. [Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," 1950]

typing on keyboards

the typewriter (n.) is gone to become a piece of furniture for hip thirty-two year olds and a statement for critical media design students. But the typing (v.) remains.