Data protection law

The twenty-sixth entry is as cláusulas contratuais-tipo, and the English name for wording of that kind began nowhere near a contract. It is « boilerplate »: text settled in advance, used unchanged, and read by almost nobody. The word repays a look, because it is not a metaphor for something rigid, which is what most readers assume. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, agencies sold ready-made columns to small newspapers and shipped them out already cast as printing plates, so that the local editor could drop them into the page and alter not a word. The plates were thick and heavy, and the printers named them after the rolled steel that boilers were built from. From the plate the name passed to the text the plate carried, and from there to any wording that arrives fixed. So « boilerplate clauses » is the ordinary phrase in an English contract, « boilerplate » alone serves as noun and as adjective, and the sentence beside this entry — that the clauses may not be altered — is the whole of the idea the word was built on.