What I've Learned

There is a trick people use to separate what a piece of writing says from how it looks on the page. It's called lorem ipsum.

Lorem ipsum is nonsensical text that is used so layouts can be checked without the distraction of meaning. In the graphic design business, using a nonsense filler was known as greeking, as in "It's Greek to me."

The text that's used, however, is not Greek, but Latin. Here's an example:

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."

More than five hundred years ago, some unknown printer scrambled a galley of type and made a type specimen book. Others copied the idea and began to use Latin passages for this, which enabled customers to choose a type and layout without being influenced by what the samples said.

The most common passage used for this is the one quoted above.

Today, if someone is starting a blog on the internet or is designing a newsletter and wants to try several layouts to see which they like the best, lorem ipsum can be used to allow each possibility a fair appraisal. Once a layout is chosen, the Latin passages will be replaced with the person's own content.

Because this practice is so useful, a demand grew for long chunks of lorem ipsum that could be copied and pasted. To fill this demand, lorem ipsum generators were developed. You fill out a form online, specify how much dummy text you want, and a program puts together strings of randomly chosen Latin words, arbitrarily grouping them into pseudo-sentences, and creates the needed filler.

The only problem with this is that people being people, some lorem ipsum generators were rigged to put jokes in mock Latin into the mix or to randomly insert English expletives. People doing layout had to learn which generators could be trusted and which could not.

It was assumed, for a very long time, that the standard lorem ipsum passage (the traditional, expletive-free one quoted above) was either random Latin words or an unknown quote from the distant past.

Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, knew it was real Latin and set about to find its origin. He picked one of the more obscure words in the paragraph, consectetur, and began searching for citations of it in classical literature.

He discovered – may his name be praised – that the lorem ipsum passage we know and love comes from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC.

The original sentence with the words lorem ipsum in it reads, "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit . . ."

"There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain . . ."

There are those, however, who love lorem ipsum, who seek after it and want to have it, simply because it's so darn useful.