Welcome to the Kotkeh ride home for July 14th, 2021.

I'm Glenn Fleischman in for Jackson Bird, who is on vacation.

It's all Greek to me, some new history about the old text, Loram Ipsum, Europa may hide its secrets more deeply than previously thought, and a man

happily discovers 160 bowling balls under his house. Here are some of the cool things from the

news today. It's almost certain you've come across the Latin seeming text that starts

Loram Ipsum, sometimes appearing in places where actual

sentences and paragraphs should be. If you read Latin, however, and a note that I do not,

the text turns out to be a mix of Latin sense and nonsense. This run of text has become a somewhat

universal placeholder used because it has a cadence of letters and word lengths that make

it an easy choice for temporarily filling space while creating designs in Latin characters

used in English and most Western European languages.

It's supposed to be replaced with actual text before printing or posting to the web.

That doesn't always happen.

The staff of Antigone and online publication created to to the web. That doesn't always happen. The staff of Antigone, an online publication created to discuss the classics in context of the 21st century,

received a letter from a reader that asked for an explanation of this text's origins,

particularly the chopped up Latin that underlies it.

Antigone recently published its reply with a detailed accounting of this familiar

distorted text that I found more compelling than many previous examinations. I was trained as a

typesetter in the 1980s on phototype setting equipment and began using a Mac with Aldous Pagemaker

1.0 in 1985 for typesetting and page layout. Lorum Ipsum was in the air, as PageMaker had built

in a run of that text as filler. I've read over the years a few different descriptions of how

Lorham Ipsum became the standard. But the Antigone explanation is the first I've seen that

...