Wasted day.

Typically I feel so optimistic and happy on a Sunday afternoon. Not so much on this particular day, I'm less than peppy - kind of lethargic - I guess it just goes to show that no matter how good your life happens to be, we all go through a day that is less than perfect.

I am just not feeling well. I guess I am just "out of sorts" or something. I have a zillion things to do, yet I can't face doing any of them right now. I kind of just want to go back to sleep.

Ever have one of those days?

"Out of sorts" - origin of the phrase: 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 fonts, 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. Later, still in Latin, it developed into the idea of one’s fate, fortune or condition. This was the first meaning of sort in English, in the thirteenth century. It survived until shortly after Shakespeare’s time, until about the point that out of sorts is first found. 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.
Many thanks to World Wide Words - copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2010.

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