The terms upper-case and lower-case to designate the size of letters stem from printer’s slang from the days of typesetting. Since they used small letters most of the time, so they were kept in a case that was lower, and therefore more easily...
Stereotyped notice in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass points back to printing, not to a social generalization. Sidney from Indianapolis, Indiana, noticed the phrase in Douglass’s line about a meeting called under the...