feugifacilisi and latin-like gibberish

[Thomas Dowling]

OK, who keeps posting the interesting questions when I'm away at a
conference? ;-)

-----Original Message-----
From: Petter Naess <pnaess at usis.no>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
Date: Friday, January 09, 1998 12:15 PM
Subject: feugifacilisi and latin-like gibberish


>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...


>From the comp.fonts FAQ at
http://www.ora.com/homepages/comp.fonts/FAQ/cf_36.htm

"Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from
Cicero's _de Finibus_ 1.10.32, which begins 'Neque porro quisquam est qui
dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...' [There is
no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants  to have it,
simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45
BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]

"What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard
dummy text ever since some printed in the 1500s took a galley of type and
scambled it to make a type specemin book; it has survived not only four
centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic
typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occational 'ing' or 'y'
thrown in. It's ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it
became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to me' and
'greeking' have common semantic roots!"



This is now a quote of a quote of a quote, but I think it has the ring of
authenticity to it.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu