Lorem Ipsum, Et Cetera
Kirt's Cogitations™ #178

Lorem Ispum, Et Cetera

Often times in technical literature, the phrase "Lorem Ipsum" appears as a generic filler for titles, names, and other nouns. Microsoft user's guides, back when such items were printed, used Lorem Ipsum extensively, as did the Aldus PageMaker. In fact, Lorem Ipsum has been used as a standard for text layout since the 1500s. The variation of character widths and "p" with a descender provided typesetters with a means to estimate the space needed to print a typical page, and the phrase, being in a foreign language, does not unnecessarily take the reader's focus off the main point of the article. Latin seems to be a good "neutral" language to use for printed matter that would ultimately be translated into multiple other languages. One problem though: Lorem Ipsum is not Latin. In fact, Lorem Ipsum is really no language at all, but is adopted from a passage in Latin by Cicero, in 45 BC: "Neque porro quisquam est qui do lorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...," which translated, is, "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..." Lorem Ipsum has become a noun, since a collection of Latin-type words arranged in pseudo-sentences and paragraphs that look authentic is referred to as Lorem Ipsum. Here is one of many online Lorem Ipsum generators.