Lorem Ipsum - December Latin Moment

     Lorem Ipsum is the strangest instance of Latin I have ever heard of. In a basic sense, Lorem Ipsum is dummy text that looks coherent enough to resemble a working sentence or paragraph, but is in fact very different. Here's the most used example:

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing 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."

     Now, I know this looks complicated, and it is. This is the first example of Lorem Ipsum used by typists, print makers, and web designers since the 1500's. The discovery of Lorem Ipsum is credited to a Latin scholar from Hampden-Sydney College, Richard McClintock. When reading a certain passage of this strange text holder, he was surprised and interested to see a word rarely used in Latin, consectetur. McClintock was able to make an bizarre, but clear connection between the mystery text and sections 1.10.32–33 of Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum  (“On the Extremes of Good and Evil”). 

     So Lorem Ipsum is a legitimate thing with traceable routes, but why in the world would anyone need something so messy and strange? Well, from it's roots in the printing of the 1500's, designers of these documents have focused not only on the content of their works, but also on the presentation of this information. In presentation, website, and article design, the designers use Lorem Ipsum before putting their real content text in so that they can make their presentation, website, or article appealing to the eye.

     Now, oblivious to the world wide impact of Lorem Ipsum, I first heard about it during my Python coding class. Currently, we are working on programs that take text files as input, and can return specific information about the files such as their total word count, the amount characters they have, and the average word length. The actual file Mr. Montana (the teacher) gives us to use in our programs is two paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum. Because the words looked similar to Latin, I was interested and was told it was Lorem Ipsum.

     Lorem Ipsum is an unseen instance of ancient Latin at work in the media today. There is an irony that web journalism uses a dummy text derived from one of the greatest writers and orators, Cicero. Lorem Ipsum also works, and because Latin is structured similarly to English, it is an accurate way to prepare for where you text will go before you have it. Overall, this was  the strangest but neatest Latin moment I have had this year.

Sources:

lipsum.com (I believe this the official online way to generate lipsum)

loremipsum.io (Incredible source)

- Will Baschab