“Lorem ipsum” is the name given to placeholder text used in the printing and typesetting industry.
It's often used in the design and layout of printed materials, websites, and various other visual mediums to demonstrate the visual form of a document or presentation without the distraction of meaningful content.
Here's an example of Lorem ipsum text:
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing 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."
Versions of the Lorem ipsum text have been used in typesetting at least since the 1960s, when it was popularised by advertisements for Letraset transfer sheets (old enough to remember those?); and Lorem ipsum was introduced to the digital world in the mid-1980s, when Aldus employed it in graphic and word-processing templates for its desktop publishing program PageMaker.
Until not so long ago it was thought to be random Latin gibberish thrown together by someone in the 1500s as a way to mock up text.
But now we know that it both means something (sort of) … and comes from somewhere.
The first two words themselves are a truncation of “dolorem ipsum” (“pain itself”). The subsequent words are a corrupted version of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BCE text by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, with words altered, added and removed to make it nonsensical and improper Latin.
The discovery of the text's origin is attributed to Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar at Hampden–Sydney College. McClintock connected Lorem ipsum to Cicero's writing sometime before 1982 while searching for instances of the Latin word consectetur, which was rarely used in classical literature. McClintock first published his discovery in a 1994 letter to the editor of Before & After magazine, contesting the editor's earlier claim that Lorem ipsum held no meaning.
The passage that McClintock found reads as follows: "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit."
In an edition of this work from the Loeb Classical Library, published in 1914, the text appears in spreads with the Latin facing the English translation. In it one Latin page ends with “Neque porro quisquam est qui do –“ and the next Latin page begins with exactly our famed text “lorem ipsum quia dolor sit ..”
The obvious conclusion is that whoever first created the sequence was sitting in front of this 1914 translated version of De Finibus, and starting from the page beginning “lorem ipsum”.
Meaning that, contrary to a long held belief, Lorem ipsum was not born in the world of printing in the 16th century, but rather appeared at the earliest after 1914 … and potentially not until 1960s when some marketing executive at Letraset tasked with generating placeholder text for an ad reached for his or her 1914 Loeb facing translation of De Finibus, and then, quoting Jack Shephard in his fine article on this subject “settled down to the hard, thankless task of absolutely butchering it”.
Not into Latin? Never mind. Nowadays, there’s no shortage of Lorem Ipsum alternatives, including Nietzsche Ipsum, Delorean Ipsum, Pirate Ipsum, Cheese Ipsum, Cat Ipsum, and DJ Khaled Ipsum. Check them out, and fill those blank pages with the gibberish of your choosing.
Story Idea: David Astle
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References
Jack Shephard, On Words and Up Words:
onwords.substack.com/p/lorem-ipsum-has-a-meaning
wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum
britannica.com/topic/Lorem-ipsum
slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/01/lorem-ipsum-history-origins
idm.hypotheses.org/2354
smh.com.au/culture/books/why-do-we-use-lorem-ipsum-and-what-does-it-mean
Images
1. Lorem ipsum
2. Lorem ipsum placeholder text on 1960s Letraset advertising
3. Cicero, the unwitting creator of Lorem ipsum
4. A portentious page break: de- lorem
5. Whoops #1
6. Whoops #2
7. Google scanned texts only started registering Lorem Ipsum post 1960
8. Lorem ipsum tattoo. Tumblr Credit: HERE
