Lorem Ipsum Explanation

 There was some confusion about the amount of Latin that had suddenly appeared on the website, a little bit of explanation:

“Lorem Ipsum” is a device used by publishers (both print and internet) to test layouts. It is a useful standard “placeholder text” put in situ allow all attention to be given to elements of design rather than content; to test out word spacing, letter spacing, line spacing and font-sizes without having to write your own junk text each time.

The original un-bastardized text was “On the Ends of Goods and Evils” by Cicero. However the “Lorem Ipsum” is a mangled form of this, and even if I were to understand Latin, I am led to believe that the text used below is incomprehensible:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

The initial section in the Cicero translates as:

“Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?”

The text (as is used by publishers) has been dated anywhere from the 1500s, to 1960, The reason it appeared on the site is because, as I was designing the layout, I did not yet have any text I wanted to use, so used the Lorem Ipsum as a filler. You may have noticed that as we have added Events, Prose, Podcasts and now this Editorial, the “Events Lorem Ipsum”, “Prose Lorem Ipsum” etc have dissapeared. This is because, as we add content, having filler content becomes redundant.

However the opportunity to write a short editorial was much appreciated.

Find out more about Lorem Ipsum at Wikipedia. From which I have practically plagiarized this post.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 13th, 2006 at 10:30 am and is filed under Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.