By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff
In old newspapers — as in from the 1880s through to the 1970s — it wasn’t uncommon to see the nonsense phrase “etaoin shrdlu” taking up a line of text in the middle of a story. The news piece, for instance, would progress normally, only to be interrupted by a word jumble, then jump right back into the narrative on the next line.
This was the age of hot type publishing, or hot metal typesetting, on type-casting machine keyboards like Linotype and Intertype. The letter keys were arranged by frequency of use, and, as it happened, the first two columns of the lower case contained the letters e, t, a, o, i, n, s, h, r, d, l and u, which were considered the most common. (Today’s most frequently used letters in the English language are e, r, i, o, t, n, s, l, and c, in that order.)
The people operating the machines would type out whatever message they were printing, and if they made a mistake, rather than fixing it on the spot and potentially disturbing the complex machinery, they would simply fill the line out with nonsense by running a finger down those two columns.
In theory, the proofreaders would then recognize the pattern and remove the stray text. They missed it often enough — especially in newsprint — that it became a recognizable and beloved quirk of print media at the time. It was nonsense given so much sentimental meaning that The New York Times created a documentary called Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu when it switched from hot metal typesetting in 1978. Variations on the jumble appear in song titles, character names and references in a wide variety of media.
Humanity found even more treasured nonsense with the progress of graphic design, publishing and web development. “Lorem ipsum” is another example. If you’ve ever opened a text box while designing a website, you’ll recognize lorem ipsum — a placeholder text that pops up everywhere, though most people don’t think about it. Versions of lorem ipsum have been used in typesetting since the 1960s and computer design since the 1980s, and nowadays, everything from Microsoft Word to Wix uses it.
People thought that lorem ipsum was pure nonsense until sometime around 1982, when Latin scholar Richard McClintock discovered that it’s actually a jumbled fragment of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s Socratic dialogue De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the ends of good and evil). Though letters have been added and altered, leaving the text far from its original Latin, anyone reading Cicero in that dead tongue is liable to pick up on it.
The first line would have originally read “dolorem ipsum” or “pain itself.” In that section, Cicero argues that no one strives for pain in life unless that pain is a means to some greater end. He uses, in this case, the example of exercise — not for its own sake, but to become more physically adept.
The section taken for lorem ipsum ends with, “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?”
Both etaoin shrdlu and lorem ipsum are, in a sense, on opposite ends of a spectrum. Lorem ipsum was a piece of ancient philosophy that has been meditated on since the first century B.C.E., and in the hubbub of typewriters and personal computers, we obscured its innate meaning. Etaoin shrdlu, on the other hand, is an exercise in ascribing meaning to the meaningless. It was a jumble of keys near one another but never intended to form its own word, yet we found the hint of human error among the mechanized typeset so endearing that we made it a symbol of print media. In both cases, the nonsensical structure of these scrambled letters is what makes them so enjoyable.
It feels like an unforeseen example of Cicero’s point. Humans could have painstakingly reset the keys whenever they mistyped, or they could have programmed computers to print a textbook whenever they needed placeholder text, but they chose playful jumbles instead of the pain of extra work. It seems that humanity has learned to enjoy the pleasure of nonsense, without consequence.
