Out of Sorts

During finals week last December, I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. At one point of the movie, Clementine says to Joel, "I'm all out of sorts." This made me giddy because I knew the true meaning behind the phrase, which I learned in Magazine Design class. So it turns out, back in the olden days, printers used metal sticks engraved with letters to print things with. Those metal sticks were called sorts. So if you were out of a certain letter, you'd say you were out of sorts. Hence the saying.