Daily Archives: October 24, 2009

When I first looked into the Word Press blog­ging plat­form I kept com­ing upon a Latin phrase which began, Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isic­ing elit.

Won­der­ing what pearls of wis­dom might be con­tained therein I went to my handy-dandy Latin trans­la­tor and entered the text.   The part quoted above came back as “Lorem itself pain he is amet con­secte­tur adip­isic­ing elit.”

???????

So I thought I might have picked an idiomatic phrase and tried just one likely Latiny-sounding word: con­secte­tur.  That pro­duced “The word/phrase is not in the dictionary.”

What? Then I thought, “Maybe this is an obso­lete form. Enter­ing a pas­sage from Chaucer into, say, an English-to-Spanish trans­la­tor might pro­duce some strange results, since that’s what I get when I try to read Chaucer.  At which point the thought occurred that, while Eng­lish has evolved from a British-German-French-Greek-Latin-Persian-Chinese-Indian base, Latin prob­a­bly hasn’t changed much in the last 1500 years.  So I was con­vinced the trans­la­tor just wasn’t up to snuff.

Then I found the source of my problem.

Lorem Ipsum is sim­ply dummy text of the print­ing and type­set­ting indus­try. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s stan­dard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a gal­ley of type and scram­bled it to make a type spec­i­men book.

The source of the infor­ma­tion IS HERE and the web site also has a tool for gen­er­at­ing mean­ing­less Latin-sounding text (should you have a use for any).

Then my Puck­ish side got the bet­ter of me. What a mar­velous Pom­pos­ity Pricker! We all know some­body who will, at the drop of a hat, explain in great detail why the movie every­body likes is trashy stu­pid­ity, or Einstein’s Gen­eral The­ory of Rel­a­tiv­ity, or the ori­gin of that obscure Cat­alon­ian phrase.

All it would take would be a sim­ple “I came across this phrase in a book [which could be true; it might have been a type­set­ting book] and it seems to be one most peo­ple know but I don’t know what it means” and then present a hunk of lorem ipsum, sit back, and enjoy the learned explanation.

For max­i­mum effect it would have to be some­body spe­cial.  Some­body who might travel to, say, Europe and tell the entire con­ti­nent that he is embar­rassed by his coun­try­men because many of them don’t speak a for­eign lan­guage.   Some­body who might so gar­ble his Span­ish, when try­ing to make a joke to the Mex­i­can con­sul, that he might say that instead of cel­e­brat­ing the Fifth of May, we are think­ing of cel­e­brat­ing The Four of Five.

Some­body like THIS.

Barack Obama may have Air Force One.  John Tra­volta may have his own 747.  But  Den­nis LeRoy Ander­son has a motor­ized La-Z-Boy recliner.  And we don’t mean “motor­ized” as in mas­sage chair.  It doesn’t recline or go back upright at the touch of a button.

Oh, no.  This bad boy has head­lights, a steer­ing wheel, a stereo sys­tem, cup-holders (natch!), an NHRA logo on the head­rest, and even dif­fer­ent speeds.  Man-oh-man!  This baby will get you to the bar in style, keep you in lordly splen­dor while you’re there, and then almost get you home again.

I can’t believe they arrested him.  Mr. Ander­son could prob­a­bly help Amer­ica reclaim its sta­tus as the world’s pre-eminent man­u­fac­tur­ing power.  Imag­ine these things in the streets of Berlin dur­ing Okto­ber­fest!  New Orleans for Mardi Gras!

Maybe the cops really just had to have the chair.  They SAY they’re going to auc­tion it.

Uh-huh.

We know what they’re really going to do!