Happy Thought for 27 January 2023

Have a Happy Thought: 

You know when you go visit a website and realise it’s not quite… finished yet?

Or when you’re creating a document and you just need to have some text on the page/screen to see what it’ll look like?

Then you’ve encountered Lorem ipsum.

This is a very fake Latin-looking set of words that are used as, well, placeholders. And have been used by typesetters for centuries. The idea is that these nonsense-words and sentences distribute letters across a page in a way that let you really see what a final piece of writing will look like – whereas if you just put “placeholder text blah blah blah” the words don’t break and flow across a page in quite the same way.

 

Here’s the “full” paragraph, created by some unnamed person, probably a printer or printer’s assistant, sometime in the 1500’s:

"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. 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."

 

Despite the fact that this text is very intentionally meaningless (it’s not just fake grammar, it’s fake words) someone has attempted a translation. To give English-speakers the experience that Latin-readers get every time they see Lorem ipsum… on a screen:

Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it, ishing for its acquisitiendum. Because he will ab hold, unless but through concer, and also of those who resist. Now a puresnore disturbeded sum dust. He ejjnoyes, in order that somewon, also with a severe one, unless of life. May a cusstums offficer somewon nothing of a poison-filled. Until, from a twho, twhochaffinch may also pursue it, not even a lump. But as twho, as a tank; a proverb, yeast; or else they tinscribe nor. Yet yet dewlap bed. Twho may be, let him love fellows of a polecat. Now amour,the, twhose being, drunk, yet twhitch and, an enclosed valley’s always a laugh. In acquisitiendum the Furies are Earth; in (he takes up) a lump vehicles bien

 

The translation is thanks to a Cambridge postgraduate, Jaspreet Singh Boparai. I came across it thanks to this blog:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/march/translating-lorem-ipsum

and this Guardian article:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/mar/21/lorem-ipsum-translated-latin-placeholder-text

 

It’s also interesting to note that there are other random-text-generators on the interwebs these days.

For example, if you’ve got a high tolerance for swears, you may be interested in the Samuel L Ipsum. I’ll let you guess the most common word in that text…

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