Matthew Gates 5m 1,181 #loremipsum
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
Lorem Ipsum. A Google search reveals over 125,000,000 results and this number increases every day. Many, many websites contain Lorem Ipsum. Usually, when anyone sets up a website with a Content Management System, Lorem Ipsum is the default. What is it and why do we use it? Lorem Ipsum is and was a language.
Currently, it is a dummy language, a dead language, and a language that serves no purpose in our culture, other than to fill in text, usually temporarily. It serves as a placeholder to show off a web page, website, or some other text. It is used to show off visual text. Lorem Ipsum is Latin, spoken by the Romans, but much of it today is gibberish, just seemingly random words.
Lorem Ipsum, however, is not just gibberish, but actual words, that when translated, actually has some type of meaning. For example, this passage, ‘Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit…’ is actually ‘There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.’ In a way, it could be poetry, but imagine what would happen in 2,000 or 3,000 years from now, if English were to suddenly disappear, and people stopped speaking it. English could be used as a Lorem Ipsum text in futuristic society.
Lorem Ipsum became the standard for everyday use since the 1500s, “when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.”
In the programming and web development world, we use it often. There have been other Lorem Ipsum generators created since then such as Cupcake Ipsum, Bacon Ipsum, Star Wars Ipsum, Chocolate Ipsum, Candy Ipsum. You can even find Ipsums that make sense, such as Disney Ipsum or Story Ipsum. A search will reveal to you plenty of generators that will produce text that actually makes sense. However, many people may not know why the text is garbled or understand it, and may recognize Lorem Ipsum the most.
At my job, we have had clients mistake Lorem Ipsum text for Spanish or Italian and asked us to change it, and we have had to inform them that it is just “filler” text that doesn’t mean anything at all. It is the industry standard, especially for English speaker, but the world likely uses it. It makes sense, considering that our language is deeply rooted from Latin words.
As was standard, I had placed Lorem Ipsum text on a web page I was doing and sent it off to the project manager for review, thinking nothing more of it. The next day, I was approached in my cubicle about something I had done and it was a “very serious issue”. My supervisor had printed out the Lorem Ipsum text that I had put on the page, and questioned me about it. I let him know that was the standard text we use as a “placeholder” to show our clients what the page would look like with text on it.
He said that a project manager (who did the review of the web page) was not pleased and felt that I was personally attacking her. He had let me know that this text was being translated into hate text and asking me why I would feel the need to do such a thing, as it was very unprofessional of me and I could be fired over it.
This was the exact text I had put on the page and what he actually printed out:
Lorem ipsum dolorem sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer nec odio. Praesent libero. Sed cursus ante dapibus diam. Sed nisi. Nulla quis sem at nibh elementum imperdiet. Duis sagittis ipsum. Praesent mauris. Fusce nec tellus sed augue semper porta. Mauris massa. Vestibulum lacinia arcu eget nulla. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Curabitur sodales ligula in libero. Sed dignissim lacinia nunc.
Curabitur tortor. Pellentesque nibh. Aenean quam. In scelerisque sem at dolor. Maecenas mattis. Sed convallis tristique sem. Proin ut ligula vel nunc egestas porttitor. Morbi lectus risus, iaculis vel, suscipit quis, luctus non, massa. Fusce ac turpis quis ligula lacinia aliquet. Mauris ipsum. Nulla metus metus, ullamcorper vel, tincidunt sed, euismod in, nibh. Quisque volutpat condimentum velit. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Nam nec ante.
Sed lacinia, urna non tincidunt mattis, tortor neque adipiscing diam, a cursus ipsum ante quis turpis. Nulla facilisi. Ut fringilla. Suspendisse potenti. Nunc feugiat mi a tellus consequat imperdiet. Vestibulum sapien. Proin quam. Etiam ultrices. Suspendisse in justo eu magna luctus suscipit. Sed lectus. Integer euismod lacus luctus magna.
A few words along with “dolorem” got picked up in Google Chrome’s translator as “hate, pain, suffer, sorrow”. The project manger thought I was writing this speech to spite her. About a year before this, I had tried to switch the Lorem Ipsum to something “fun and stupid”, using “bacon ipsum” and a “cupcake ipsum” and the supervisor had scolded for doing that, saying, “We need to provide the client with serious work. Funny text like this is not appropriate.” This too, almost got me fired, as the supervisor was not very pleased at all. So I went back to using Lorem Ipsum text.
The project manager “reported me” because her Chrome browser was automatically translating the Lorem Ipsum text. She thought I was purposely writing that I hated her. He had asked me to show him all my Lorem Ipsum text and then said I should use something else that wasn’t “hate speech.”
It took two other co-workers, who had near-identical text to my Lorem Ipsum, to convince my supervisor that I did not write any hate speech at all. One of my co-workers who spoke Spanish, tried to translate it herself by taking “dolor”, which means “pain” in Spanish, and “odio” which means “hate”, and other root words to understand why it was translating into that text.
Finally, after their confirmations of using the same text, the supervisor and the project manager had a discussion, and I was off the hook. You would not think that “Lorem Ipsum” text could lead to such problems, but at my workplace, it sure did. Although some of the text is actually words, Lorem Ipsum is meaningless in everyday language, except for Latin scholars.
I was totally willing to go back to “bacon” or “cupcake” Ipsum text or some other text, but the supervisor advised me that I could not. Instead, he rendered to the fact that it was really not that big of a deal. Lorem Ipsum is still, and probably always will be, the industry standard for what everyone uses.
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