Lorem Ipsum
Image: Anthony Majanlahti (cc)
Have you ever come across the dummy text known as Lorem Ipsum? This is the text widely used in the printing industry to demonstrate how a publication will look when it’s printed. But why not use any old slab of English text? Because if the text is readable, people will, er … read it. And that’s not what designers want. Rather, they would prefer you paid attention to the features they have devised to make your book or report look fabulous.
Lorem Ipsum originated in the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only 5 centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Classicists among you will recognise that Lorem Ipsum is Latin text (sort of), usually mixed up with nonsense words to reflect the standard distribution of English words on a page. It has its roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, ‘de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum’ (The Extremes of Good and Evil) written by the great Roman orator and statesman, Cicero.
So what’s it mean then? Well, it concerns, among other things, why you might go to the gym:
Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself [dolorem ipsum], because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?
So now you know … and you’ve taken a satisfying draught from the deep Ciceronian well of wisdom.
