December 12, 2001

12:13 PM

Testing, one two three. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipscing elit, diam nonnumyeiusmod tempor incidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquam eratvolupat. (Someone shouldn't post test code on the live server - tipped-off by Molly)
posted by endquote (21 comments total)

Well, it's been helpful to me that so many people have made this "mistake" when I need to borrow a cup of Lorem Ipsum from one of my Net neighbors...
posted by alumshubby at 12:22 PM on December 12, 2001

Also: Local news for Anytown, US.
posted by endquote at 12:24 PM on December 12, 2001

Cicero: "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 . . .").
posted by Carol Anne at 12:39 PM on December 12, 2001

Cicero never met a Chicago Cubs fan.
posted by alumshubby at 12:40 PM on December 12, 2001

i love the 'hey, shouldnt this work' headline placeholder. hey!
posted by c at 12:43 PM on December 12, 2001

Almost as good as "Insert Something Meaningful Here".
posted by jennak at 12:54 PM on December 12, 2001

I can see it now -- CTO calls in entire QA staff.

"You're all fired."

"But, but we never even saw those pages!"

"Exactly."

It's weird, practically every designer seems to use lorem ipsum dummy copy, but no one knows where it came from. Been around for a long time though. Probably some printer's apprentice, back in the day, started the first (and oldest) meme ever....
posted by mattpfeff at 12:55 PM on December 12, 2001

•asldkfja;lsdfjk
•asldkfja;lsdfjk
•asldkfja;lsdfjk
•asldkfja;lsdfjk

ahhh, good to see that even Microsoft techs use the tried and tested method of random key mashing to generate sample copy.
posted by mkn at 12:59 PM on December 12, 2001

Lorem Ipsum is boring! Branch out your latin...

My personal favorites are Gaius Valerius Catullus ... or the sadly beautiful Pervigilium Veneris which starts as a pretty ode to spring and ends with TS Eliot like angst, roughly:

She sings, we are silent. When does my spring come?
When will I become as a wanderer, so that I may cease my silence?
I destroyed the Muse by being silent, not even Phoebus looks back at me.
Thus like Amyclas, when they were silent, silence was lost.

Its just as incomprehensible to people as Lorem Ipsum, but a lot more interesting :)
posted by malphigian at 1:05 PM on December 12, 2001

If you're getting into Lorem Ipsum alternatives, Greeking for the 21st Century is one I use often.
posted by mkn at 1:08 PM on December 12, 2001

Just a guess here (from an old MSNBC.com worker), but it looks to me like these are affiliate pages, pages set up for local TV stations to write and format their stories for distribution on MSNBC. Probably a playground area for the training of said affiliate stations.

Admittedly, it's bad form to not exclude this area from searches, but I really doubt anyone's getting fired over it... Although there were those MSNBC.com layoffs not so long ago, you know - the one where they refused to give an exact number of those laid off, but said it was "equivalent to 9% of their full staff of 200". Hmmm.
posted by kokogiak at 1:15 PM on December 12, 2001

Eleven comments about a search of test text copy.
Whew.
Slow Day.
posted by Perigee at 2:00 PM on December 12, 2001

that 21st century greeking is great for email as well..i'll send paragraphs out at random to friends and watch them try to respond.
posted by th3ph17 at 2:09 PM on December 12, 2001

Um.. This really isn't news.
posted by bitdamaged at 2:11 PM on December 12, 2001

Nope. You can get essentially the same result by feeding the phrase to Google. Designers forget to remove this stuff all the time.
posted by Su at 2:26 PM on December 12, 2001

mattpfeff: as Carol Anne elliptically indicated, the phrase originally comes from Cicero, and seems to start at a line break. It may indeed go all the way back to the earliest days of typesetting, though its origins are far more likely to be recent.
posted by dhartung at 3:01 PM on December 12, 2001

dhartung: yup, read CA's comment, and knew about the Cicero semblance; it's just interesting how so many designers use it without knowing why. How did it ever get from Cicero to here? It seems, while there's a fair amount of conjecture about it, it's pretty much anyone's guess.
posted by mattpfeff at 3:17 PM on December 12, 2001

Um.. This really isn't news.

Yeah, and this site isn't called Newsfilter, so what's your point?
posted by eyeballkid at 3:36 PM on December 12, 2001

My personal feeling regarding this matter is best expressed as lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation, but most results in the subjugation of the working class.

I passed high school this way. of course, I wouldn't have been able to pull it off without near-illegible handwriting
posted by fuq at 4:52 PM on December 12, 2001

lorem ipsum no more!
posted by lotsofno at 6:26 PM on December 12, 2001

Lorem ipsum: Being obviously scrambled, there was little chance that it would accidentally be left in place when the publication reached its final form...
posted by Zurishaddai at 1:47 AM on December 13, 2001