YESTERDAY, WE MENTIONED jamais vu, the familiar becoming peculiar through extreme repetition. (Try saying “table” 30 times.)
Speaking of Which. I’m reminded of an opposite word game, the one starting with “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet….” The WordGenius website recently discussed this “traditional placeholder or ‘dummy’ text used in typesetting and graphic design for previewing layouts.”
The idea is to trick the brain away from reading the text and to focus it on the design of the layout. I’ve also seen it used to indicate the necessary addition at the end of an article to fill an appropriate gap.
This and the following image from Priceonomics.com.
Indeed, here’s the standard Lorem ipsum passage. If you need more text, just “take it from the top.”
“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”
Giving Google Translate a Try. It looks kinda like Latin, but if you feed it to Google Translate, it comes out as follows:
“It is important to take care of the patient, to be followed by the patient, but it will happen at such a time that there is a lot of work and pain. For to come to the smallest detail, no one should practice any kind of work unless he derives some benefit from it. Do not be angry with the pain in the reprimand in the pleasure he wants to be a hair from the pain in the hope that there is no breeding. Unless they are blinded by lust, they do not come forth; they are in fault who abandon their duties and soften their hearts, that is, their labors.”
This sounds suspiciously to me like an A.I. hallucination. I like “he wants to be a hair from the pain in the hope that there is no breeding.” Though it also reminds me of Philosophy 101.
Latin, Sorta. The WordGenius website notes, “Until the 1990s, it was thought to be a jumble of random words, but there are clues to the mystery. Latin scholar Professor Richard McClintock traced the text to a passage from De finibus bonorum et malorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”), an ethical treatise written by the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, circa 45 BCE. McClintock was able to track the Lorem ipsum text by searching Latin texts for the word consectetur, which he ultimately found in the 1914 Loeb Classical Library edition of the Cicero text.”
Image from uxdesign.cc.
And Then There’s Copypasta. The WordGenius website also mentions “copypasta.” Wikipedia describes, “A copypasta is a block of text copied and pasted to the internet and social media. Copypasta containing controversial ideas or lengthy rants are often posted for humorous purposes, to provoke reactions from those unaware that the posted text is a meme.
The word comes from the computer term “copy/paste.”
Navy Seal. One example is Navy Seal, sometimes known as Gorilla Warfare per a misspelling of “guerrilla warfare.” Wikipedia describes it as “an aggressive but humorous attack paragraph supposedly written by an extremely well-trained member of the United States Navy SEALs (hence its name) to an unidentified ‘kiddo,’ ostensibly whoever the copypasta is directed to.”
The author typically boasts of increasingly ludicrous accomplishments: “being able to kill in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands,” Wikipedia recounts.
Pre-Internet Copypasta. Gee, years ago I had a face-to-face encounter with this phenomenon: Neighbor Skip and his wife lived in the same suburban apartment complex, and he constantly entertained me with exploits of his clandestine military years. All the while, his wife would tell mine, “Don’t mind Skip. He’s a regular BS artist; he never left Fort Devens.”
Yeah, what with A.I. and all, there’s a lot of that going around these days. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023