🚀 go-pugleaf

Stereotypes.  The term was a printer's word for the lead newsprint master
plate (I only minored in Printing, so more experienced folk can correct
me, please).  

From the general lack of coherent definition about the subject (we're swishy,
we're butch, we're invisible, we're doctors...) I'd like to chime in and
perhaps put to rest further confusion.  A stereotype, regardless of it's
content, is useful and restrictive.  It's useful to quickly summarize ideas and
keep conversation apace.  It's restrictive in that no one person ever falls
under the full label.  Whatever the label is, or it's implications. And those
nuances of meaning are largely different for everyone, it seems.  

Without stereotypes (or indeed words themselves) we'd have to communicate
like the Ents in "The Lord of The Rings":  talking for years just to say
the word "hill".  I guess the trick is to use them sparingly and make sure
we don't operate on unfounded notions where it may be important to know
how someone is and isn't.

I hope that makes sense and is to the point.  Now, the first person who
finds their teeth being cleaned by a lisping dentist in leather...
\bob