In Love With Lorum Ipsum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit… So begins Lorum Ipsum. Long used by graphic designers, the text that constitutes Lorum Ipsum, originally a section of a book by Cicero, serves as filler in sample layouts or web pages. By varying in word and paragraph length, the text is much more useful in creating templates and designs than repeating "place text here" 500 times. For more on the history of Lorum Ipsum and to generate your own dummy text (you know you want to), please see www.lipsum.com.

I do design work, but that's not why I'm writing about this Latin today. What surprises me is that I love reading Lorum Ipsum. I use reading liberally here, since I don’t comprehend a word, but that doesn’t stop me from having a go. When I come across it—and this actually does happen from time to time in my line of work—I stop what I’m doing, take a few minutes, and read this text that I don’t understand.

I love the sound of the words as I pronounce them in my head, those fluent vowels and tweaked combinations of consonants in words that are vaguely familiar. I love the variety of sentence length; early on we get the two-word sentence “Nullam posuere.” Is this a command of some kind, or some kind of slang? In between two longer sentences, it’s lovely in its brevity. I mostly love the paradox of the text—so random by its intent, but so intentional on the page that seeing it filled later with English seems unfitting. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio, as they say.

I take the time when I have the time to soak in the words because my mind reacts with the satisfaction of comprehension, even if I can’t tell you what I’m comprehending. Is this so hard to imagine? Language is the one piece that separates us from the rest of what lives, the one thing we’ve got that no other being has. Anthropologists tell us that humans are almost identical physically speaking—it’s the extremely tiny remainder of chromosomal patterns that distinguishes how we look. I have to believe that language works with the same ratios, its purpose and intent almost 100% the same, despite coming in 6,000 varieties.

Don’t some words speak to you beyond their meaning, or as an extension of their meaning, or possibly in spite of their meaning? This happens in tongues we don't know, but also in our own language. The word woebegone haunts me: its meaning is evident just in how the word looks and sounds. So it goes with joy, and go, and sometimes eye. And I enjoy very much how awkward the word awkward is. These words take me to places my mind will not, on an unintended, unplanned, sub rosan journey.

Other members of the same language call me back home, but I don't lose what I gained. On a recent odyssey I drifted toward tintinnabulation. That’s my ultimate example of a word losing its arbitrary nature and existing on equal terms with its meaning. It’s not a big word, but it takes us on a big orbit, so evident, so lovingly crafted. I remember hearing the sound of bottles being cleaned up in London on New Year’s Day so long ago—thousands of city workers sweeping the broken glass through the streets hours after the city broke in celebration.



Like the Latin that pushed me to ponder that wormhole between language and meaning, tintinnabulation shatters the boredom of my insides in a melodic crash. This word, accessible but mythical, places language in its right place, full of mystery and artistry as it helps me understand my place in history, that place discovered upon its death.

I originally published a version of these words in Some Other Magazine, the online baby of good friend Beth Marois and me. You can still visit this lovely pub in its grave.