2012-02-12
post/17500526695
I’ve already talked a little about my glitchy lorem ipsum image, including a rough how-to guide. However, when I blithely pasted in the text to the hex editor, I didn’t know (or had forgotten) the origins of the phrase itself.
As The Straight Dope notes, it’s derived from a passage of Cicero’s On the Boundaries of Goods and Evils. In translation (H. Rackham, 1914):
Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but 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?
Richard McClintock, the discoverer of the phrase, wrote this about it in Before & After, a desktop publishing magazine:
What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged.
I wish I’d known all of this when I produced the image, but I’m happy to take it as a post-facto rationale.
