feugifacilisi and latin-like gibberish

[Petter Naess]

Can someone explain the curious - and surely unintended - occurrence of
Latin or bogus Latin at certain web-sites? A recurring text begins:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diem nonummy
nibh euismod tincidunt ut lacreet dolore magna aliguam erat volutpat. Ut
wisis enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tution ullamcorper
suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis te
feugifacilisi. Duis autem dolor... and so on.

A Webferret search on the nonsense word "feugifacilisi" therein turned up
about 50 such sites - you can sample one at

http://www.chinatownphx.com/technolo.htm

I suspect this has something to do with FrontPage - when I load the
FrontPage editor and create a new file using one of the one-column body
options, I find the same text! I assume they've used this meaningless
gibberish to represent "text that goes here" without confusing people with
meaning, but for me this is not helpful. I guess I must stop attributing
meaning to words. What really baffles me though is how this stuff gets on
to the web!

Another curious example of Latin is to be found at the State Department
Political-Military Affairs Bureau's Mine Web Page at

http://www.mineweb.org/html/profiles.html

(although the *.org rather than *.gov domain arouses suspicions...)

There the text is:

Experieris non Dianam magis montibus quam Minervam inerare. Vale. Ridebis,
et licet rideas. Ego ille quem nosti apros et quidem pulcherrimos cepi.
Ipse? inquis. Ipse; non tamen ut omnino ab inertia mea et quete iscederem.

Although my Latin is rusty - hardly anyone in Norway speaks it these days
- this does seem to bear a closer resemblance to the real thing, at least
parts of it.

I have made an effort to find some discussion of this matter on the web,
but nobody seems to have broached it - have any of you encountered this
strange phenomenon, and can you explain it?

Best regards,


Petter Naess
Information Resource Center
U.S. Information Service  (USIS)
American Embassy
Drammensvn.18
0244 Oslo, Norway
phone 22562522
fax 22440436
email pnaess at usis.no