#consectetur

•Punctilious Consectetur•

What follows is the wonderful and slightly absurd story of Lorem Ipsum - the placeholder gibberish that actually originated from one man’s grief in Ancient Rome.

Nobody sets out to become the author of the most widely read text in human history, but that is precisely what happened to Marcus Tullius Cicero in 45 BC, when he sat down to write a rather dry philosophical treatise called De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (which translates, with characteristic Roman directness, as On the Ends of Good and Evil). It was not, by any account, a riotous read. Cicero was working through his grief after the death of his daughter and processing it the way Roman intellectuals tended to, which is to say by producing several thousand words on the nature of virtue and suffering.

Somewhere in the middle of it, he wrote a passage beginning “Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet…”, meaning roughly “Nor is there anyone who loves pain itself because it is pain…” It sat there quietly for about fifteen hundred years, bothering nobody.

Then, in the 1500s, an anonymous typesetter working for a Renaissance-era printing house did something that graphic designers have never entirely forgiven or forgotten. Needing a block of realistic-looking Latin text to fill a page and demonstrate a new typeface, he grabbed Cicero’s philosophical meditation on suffering, scrambled it thoroughly, removed any passages that might accidentally make sense, and produced the now-universal dummy text beginning “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” It was, essentially, the world’s first copy-paste job. The result was gibberish, but very convincing gibberish, which it turns out is exactly what the design industry has needed ever since. Cicero, who spent his life fretting about legacy and the proper use of language, would presumably have had strong feelings about this. We can only be grateful he is not here to express them.

Ok cool, so how did it end up as the standard placeholder text on that website you’re trying to build?

The decisive moment came in 1984, when a software company called Aldus released a desktop publishing program called PageMaker. PageMaker needed sample text to fill its template pages, and a man named Dr Richard McClintock, with either great erudition or access to a very old printing manual, reached for the Lorem Ipsum passage. Copy-Paste

It shipped with the software and landed on the desks of every graphic designer, layout artist, and marketing manager in the Western world practically overnight. When the web arrived a decade later and designers needed placeholder text to mock up websites, Lorem Ipsum was simply already there, sitting in every design program they owned, familiar and unquestioned, like a piece of furniture that has been in the hallway so long nobody remembers who bought it or why. A few people have tried to dislodge it over the years, proposing alternatives involving pangrams or cheerful nonsense, but Lorem Ipsum has proved immovable. Cicero, who was eventually murdered on the orders of Mark Antony and had his hands nailed to the Senate door as a warning to others, would no doubt find it deeply satisfying that his words, however mangled, have outlasted everyone who ever wished him ill.

Here’s more from a fabulous interview with said Dr McClintock if you want to explore this etymological Rabbit Hole