A Look into Lorem Ipsum
Lorem ipsum is a bunch of Latin nonsense. Unlike AI hallucinations that have led to non-exsistent terms showing up in academic papers, the scrambled eggs of this text comes from dry-transfer type!
Originally published in 2021.
Lorem ipsum—that chunk of garbled Latin used as a placeholder text—falls squarely into my purview, but I’ve never written about it. Why? Because unlike ETAOIN SHRDLU and some similar typographic and type oddities, a lot of articles have been written about the topic and it’s well explored. Or at least I thought so? I’m subbing as a host on the Kottke Ride Home podcast this week and next, a sort of general-interest, eclectic daily podcast about interesting things like those found at the long-running Kottke.org, with which it’s affiliated.
The site Antigone, a classics site devoted to modern analysis, someone wrote in to ask about the use of lorem ipsum in an odd 1960s ad they remembered. The scholars at Antigone attacked the topics from several angles and I wrote a short segment on it. Here’s a cleaned-up version of my script, which is very much like an article, along with images I couldn’t insert into the “audio” version!
