Etaoin Hamburgevons Lorem

[...] Loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but ... circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great .... To take a trivial example, which of us ever ... laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage? But who ... find fault ... chooses to enjoy a pleasure ... one ... avoids a pain ... produces no ...?

Does this excerpt seem somehow familiar to you? No? What if I told you that there's a fair chance that you've read it before — just in another language?

The above text is a partial translation of Lorem ipsum, one of the most famous placeholder texts used in graphic design and publishing. The quote is, to be more precise, translated from the real-life text from which Lorem ipsum has been sourced. If you tried to make sense of it, you needn't bother: Lorem ipsum is a scrambled version of a first-century BC text from Cicero, with words and letters altered, rendering it an unintelligible distortion of Latin (and the translation consequently nonsensical). The words lorem ipsum, for instance, appear as dolorem ipsum in their original context.

Despite the ancient origins of the source text, Lorem ipsum itself is quite a bit more recent. The earliest verified use of Lorem ipsum is from the 1960s, brought to light by Letraset, a company manufacturing so-called dry-transfer typeface sheets. They used Lorem ipsum in their advertising, thus helping popularise the now-famous filler text. It is fascinating how the origin of the text seems to have been almost immediately lost to time, as it had to be "discovered" in the 1980s by one Richard McClintock, who published his findings on this mysterious piece of gibberish in 1994.

In the world of gibberish placeholder texts, the unassuming qwerty is likely even more well-loved and widely used than the somewhat bourgeois Lorem ipsum. Qwerty feels the more democratic of the two, being in the immediate reach of every keyboard warrior and humble netizen. It might be a bit too cumbersome to fill out whole pages with, but quite practical for some quick noodling on the keyboard. Qwerty hasn't, however, always reigned supreme: while the keyboard layout itself is quite old (first emerging in the 1870s), there was a time when etaoin shrdlu was more prominent as a filler.

Etaoin shrdlu represents an antiquated type-casting keyboard layout used in hot type printing. When a typecasting machine operator fumbled a line, they would run their finger down the first columns of the keyboard in order to fill out the row, which was then supposed to be singled out and removed while proof-reading the matrices. Yet, sometimes the occasional etaoin or a random shrdlu slipped past proof-readers — with hilarious results. Etaoin shrdlu was accidentally printed with such apparent frequency that it became an industry staple of sorts.

While qwerty and etaoin shrdlu are both based on letter frequency, Hamburgevons takes a slightly different approach — it contains all the fundamental forms of the Latin alphabet; an ideal representation of any typeface. This modal perfection extends to its pronunciation as well: it rolls off the tongue so effortlessly that it would be impossible to think that no aesthetic consideration was given formulating this gobbledegook. The fact that it whimsically suggests the most popular type of fast food in the world is just the cherry on top of the hamburgevons.