First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Some readers may recognize the above as the start of a widely-used editorial “filler” or “placeholder” text—a block of words put temporarily into the space where real editorial copy will eventually go, to help editors estimate what the final version will look like and what the word-count will be. We use “lorem ipsum” at Prospect, along with the slightly less romantic “something in here something in here something in here something in here” for our standfirsts (the introductory or summary information above an article.)

“Lorem ipsum” looks like Latin but isn’t, quite, although it is based on a Latin text. Specifically—as we know today thanks to the efforts of one Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia—it derives from a passage in Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum [On the Extremes of Goods and Evils], which begins:

Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, ed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.

It means, approximately:

There is no-one who wishes to obtain and seeks out pain simply because it is pain; but there are occasionally circumstances in which toil and pain can bring a person great pleasure.

All modern editors will, I’m sure, have a rich empathy with these sentiments, but their use as a placeholder dates right back to the 1500s, not long after the invention of printing itself. It’s a rather lovely thought—that something continues to be used in an industry almost half a millennium after its first appearance, without there being any pressing reason for this continuity—and yet “lorem ipsum” is only the tip of the editorial iceberg.

Take the example of Hypertext Markup Language, better known as html: the behind-the-scenes code used to generate the appearance of web pages. It’s very much a twenty-first-century affair, yet a closer look soon reveals some ancient terminologies and ideas still in use. To create this effect, for example, I use the “emphasis” tag, <em>; while to create this effect I use the “strong emphasis” tag, <strong>. They’re a more useful pair of terms than “italics” and “bold” because they’re more sensitive to semantics, but they also stretch back to the dawn of printing and, before this, to those Greek and Roman rhetorical devices of which Cicero was such a master (emphasis, Latin, from Greek, denoting “special and significant stress by means of position or repetition.”)

In many ways, the project of making words lucidly convey sense and feeling has been less transformed by technology than you might think.