Lorem Ipsum

This is my blog, with which I hope to entertain and edify the world. The current blog subjects are"whatever I feel like" and the schedule is "whenever I have time". Which of course makes it no different from half the other blogs on the internet, but with any luck it should prove to be interesting. For lack of a better first subject, I'm going to write about... blogging, which probably sets some kind of a fourth-wall-busting speed record.

One of the things involved in making a blog on this site (Blogger) is creating a "theme" (eg, shape and colour scheme of the page). You can make your own if you have the html skills, but it also conveniently provides a couple of premade themes that you can choose from if you're too unskilled and/or lazy to bother making one yourself. (The fact that pretty much any randomly chose blog will use one of the out-of-the-box themes probably says... something.) Anyways, here's the choose-a-sample page:

The theme options are all illustrated, with some sample posts and text. What sample posts and text? Well, if we blow the Sand Dollar theme (the one I'm currently using) up really large, we get

Sample Blog, My Profile, and some posts consisting of... gibberish. Latin gibberish. Actually, if you know Latin, you'll realize it's gibberish there too: it's a couple of posts full of pseudo-Latin gibberish (with a little Pig Latin thrown in). Which is... pretty weird, when you think about it. Why the nonsense?

Well, the answer is a couple of centuries old. Back in the day - the day, in this case, being "since the invention of typography" - a popular way of showing off new typefaces was with sample sentences: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ being a popular one, of course, but others - like the famous "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" - were used as well. The obvious benefit of these is that, since the hypothetical typeface customer is interested only in what the font looks like and not what any particular piece of text looks like in it, you can get away with using nonsense text like the above to show it off. (The quick brown fox has the slight advantage that it looks a little more like actual text than the alphabet, and so demonstrates the legibility of the font a little more.)

Related to this problem is the problem of page design. If you want to show off your typesetting skills, you can make a similar sample page with your headings and columns and paragraphs and so forth. The problem with this is you need something a little more text-like than just the alphabet or the quick brown fox. (Look at the famous "all work and no play" scene from The Shining - even before you can read it, the weird repetitive patterns in the text give away that it's not real writing.) But at the same time you don't want the reader to be distracted reading actual text - you want him concentrating on your layout. So back around 1500 or so, someone took a chunk of Cicero's finibus bonorum et malorum, grabbed about every every third syllable, and created a piece of pseudo-text, beginning "lorem ipsum dolores sit amet" that resembled real text pretty closely but made no sense whatsoever, even to people who knew Latin. (Insert Alan Sokal joke here.)

This sample text hung around for a couple of hundred years as exactly that: a spacefiller text used for typsetting examples, or occasionally just for filling space.

In the 1960s and 70s, as computer typesetting came into its own, lorem ipsum remained popular - just because you're typesetting by computer rather than by hand doesn't change its marketing needs - and then in the 1990s it got another big boost with the arrival of web design companies. Selling your web design skills is, at some level, a lot like selling your typesetting: you have to show off the design without distracting the user with, well, actual text.

So lorem ipsum moved smoothly into the net age and has remained there to this day. (See also.) Which is why the layout for the blog themes on Blogger are full of pseudo-Latin.

Well, probably. The thumbnails are a little small to make out more than the titles and a very little of the text, but fortunately you can look at the actual preview and see...

Something entirely different: English. More on this next time.