ABOUT STEREOTYPES – FROM TYPOGRAPHICAL MOULDS TO MATRIXES OF THOUGHT
ABOUT STEREOTYPES – FROM TYPOGRAPHICAL MOULDS TO MATRIXES OF THOUGHT

Summary/Abstract: From 1798 until now, the society has passed from the term of "stereotype", which at that time called the typographic moulds of lead, to that of "stereotype" in the sense given by Walter Lipmann, that is of the images in our mind, which helps us build an interpretation of the world, necessary to understand it, to adapt and find a place and a role within it. Although stereotypes seem to play a positive role, helping us to think and react more quickly to a new situation, they are a kind of false friends, leading us to a subjective form of normality, and what lies outside this normality it becomes the fuel for stigmatizing those who are not "common". Stereotypes contribute to increasing social distance and push people to act to the detriment of other people, such as ethnic stereotypes, those antipathy based on inflexible generalizations, resulting in the emergence of vulnerable communities in the face of aggressive discourses. The importance of stereotypes as precursors of prejudices and foundations of discrimination is equally great, regardless of whether we talk about the abundance of negative references to Jews in Romanian proverbs and sayings, the negative attributes related to the Roma ethnicity in various Romanian dictionaries, the journalistic discourse related to the "exoticism" of the LGBT community or the unfavourable views of the Hungarian minority by the Romanian majority. Therefore, conceptions such as "eating at the Jew but not sleeping at night alone in his house" or "they will call the gypsies to take you if you are not behaving yourself" are equivalent to ideas about genetic determination or mental disorder that induce homosexuality, as well as eating meat kept under the saddle by the predecessors of the present times Hungarians and all these ideas are efficient fertilizers for conflicts, waiting only for a trigger.

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