11.0574 ...(do)lorem ipsum... Cicero, de fin. 1.10.32

Humanist Discussion Group (humanist@kcl.ac.uk)
Tue, 10 Feb 1998 19:31:44 +0000 (GMT)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 11, No. 574.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

[1] From: Jascha Kessler <jkessler@ucla.edu> (11)
Subject: lorem ipsum

[2] From: "[ISO-8859-1] Mats Dahlström" <MAD@adm.hb.se> (43)
Subject: Re: 11.0571 Lorem ipsum?

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 16:08:28 -0800
From: Jascha Kessler <jkessler@ucla.edu>
Subject: lorem ipsum

As I recall, lorem impsum showed up first for me with Pagemaker over a
decade ago, and the explanation was that it was a printer's gabble, to fill
a block of type, set by hand, as the linotype of yore used to seize up and
print shrdlu, or something close to that.
Jascha Kessler

Jascha Kessler
Professor of English & Modern Literature
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
Department of English
Box 951530
Los Angeles, California 90095-1530
Telephone/Facsimile: (310) 393-4648

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 1998 12:24:07 +0100
From: "[ISO-8859-1] Mats Dahlström" <MAD@adm.hb.se>
Subject: Re: 11.0571 Lorem ipsum?

In response to Chuck Bush,

> Can anyone tell me the origins of the "Lorem ipsum" text that is often used
> as content-less filler in word processor tutorials, demos, manuals, etc.?

I quote below from:
http://www.uni-mb.si/local/fontfaq/cf_36.htm

Rick Pali submits the following from Before and After Magazine,
Volume 4 Number 2.:

[quote]

After telling everyone that Lorem ipsum, the nonsensical text that
comes with PageMaker, only looks like Latin but actually says nothing,
I heard from Richard McClintock, publication director at the
Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who had enlightening news:

"Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage
from Cicero's _de Finibus_ 1.10.32, which begins '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.]. [de Finibus Bonorum
et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics
very popular in the Renaisance.]

"What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's
standard dummy text ever since some printed in the 1500s took a galley
of type and scambled it to make a type specemin book; it has survived
not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the
leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an
occational 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. It's ironic that when the
then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as
Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to me' and 'greeking' have common
semantic roots!"

[end quote]

Enlightening?

Yours sincerely, Mats Dahlström

Mats Dahlstroem / Lecturer
University College of Boras, Sweden
Dept of Library and Info. Science
mats.dahlstrom@hb.se
+46 (0)33 - 16 44 21
Fax: (0)33 - 16 40 05
URL: http://www2.hb.se/bhs/mad/www/

Co-director of ITH: Information Technology
Studies as a Human Science
http://www.hb.se/bhs/ith/ith.htm

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