What you should know about “boilerplate”

Last week, I wrote about the benefits and limitations of ChatGPT. And just a few things we need to be concerned about regarding this new technology.

One common criticism of ChatGPT, or a point that some techies use to placate fears that ChatGPT will displace writers and journalists, is that ChatGPT creates “boilerplate” text. It’s good at filler and forms, but not poetry or novels.

Yes, this is comforting to a Word Nerd who would like to publish, but it also brought up another question. Where in the world does “boilerplate” come from and why do we use it to refer to boring filler text? A lawyer recently used “boilerplate” to describe the lengthy and clearly not personalized trust that my father paid another lawyer for years ago.

Thank you Merriam-Webster for an enlightening answer!

The term boilerplate was first used in 1893. Back then, small town newspapers depended on copy from large publishing syndicates to fill their pages. The syndicates sent editorials and feature articles already set in type on plates to the small papers, making the copy easy to print. Printers called the plates “boiler plates” because they looked like the plating used for steam boilers. Eventually, “boilerplate” referred to the stories on the plates as well as the plates themselves. Since the quality of those stories wasn’t great, “boilerplate” came to refer to unoriginal writing.

So, here are our current definitions for boilerplate:

: syndicated material supplied especially to weekly newspapers in matrix or plate form
: standardized text
: formulaic or hackneyed language, e.g., “bureaucratic boilerplate“

Now you know!

Can you share a term with unusual origin? I’d love it if it was related to writing or newspapers.

Thanks for getting nerdy with me!