Lorem ipsum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam condimentum feugiat est. Donec euismod elit tincidunt arcu. Curabitur gravida magna eu orci aliquet ultrices. Donec eleifend imperdiet dolor. Mauris in leo in lacus porta luctus.

Lorem Ipsum is printing and typesetting dummy text, according to this website, it has been in use since the 1500s when an unknown printer took a galley of latin type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. The whole point of Lorem Ipsum is that it allows a person to look at the 'form' of a page without being distracted by the content. I suspect that many honours students could use Lorem Ipsum in their theses - a possible defence of such use being 'Hey man, almost all the letters that would be found in the words that you want are there".

Surviving not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, Lorem Ipsum has remained essentially unchanged. However some feel that 'the heart' has left the Lorem Ipsum world since we all moved from cold type presses. Still others complain that moving away from woodblock lettering lies at the foundation of the great Lorem Ipsum wars that have plagued the last decades. Regardless of it's nature (electronic or otherwise) Lorem Ipsum has endured and prospered, coming to wide popularity in the groovy 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages. A follow up single "Lorem Ipsum and the brass rubbings" failed to chart.

More recently Lorem Ipsum has 'gone digital' and it can be found in such computer software programs as "Apple Pages" which comes with templates filled with Lorem Ipsum. A cynic would suggest that this is the ultimate end that computer programs are working towards: not only do they make life easier for you, they also complete the job without you having to do anything at all. A 'knock-off' of Lorem Ipsum (Morel muspl) has recently been released by a possie of Postmodernists. However nobody is sure what this knock-off looks really looks like, if it really exists anyway and why, since pages are a 'construct' and don't need to be as they are, it should be used at all.

Perhaps the most accurate thing one can say about Lorem Ipsum is that it is not simply random text; its roots lie in a piece of classical Latin literature by Cicero dating from 45 BCE. Typical of Cicero's light bedside manner some of the piece  that Lorem Ipsum was based upon is as follows: "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..." This translates as: "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..." Presumably this was the equivalent of Roman 'Light Entertainment', something light to entertain jittery locals living on the borders of the Rhine.