put down

In letterpress printing, to put down meant to replace uppercase letters with lowercase ones in a compositor's stick or galley. A compositor working from manuscript would set type character by character into a composing stick, retrieving sorts from a type case. If the copy called for a word in capitals followed by lowercase, the setter would physically remove the capital sorts and substitute the smaller lowercase versions, or set the line with lowercase from the start if that was the layout decision.

The term reflected the actual mechanical work: type sits in a case with uppercase letters in the upper compartments and lowercase in the lower ones, so changing from caps to lowercase meant reaching downward to a different section of the case. A compositor might put down a headline after setting it in all caps, or put down initial letters that had been set in small caps for emphasis.

Put down became obsolete as phototypesetting replaced hand composition in the 1960s and 1970s. A typist or operator at a keyboard could toggle between cases with a single keystroke; there was no physical motion downward, no reaching to a different drawer of type. The vocabulary of hand composition, including put down, lost its anchor in the material world and gradually disappeared from the trade.

Related terms like sorts, case, composing stick, and even compositor itself have similarly vanished from active use. The phrase survives mainly in technical histories and in the reference materials of printing museums, preserved as evidence of how deeply the physical constraints of a technology shaped its language.