If you've ever paid any attention to typesetting or to Apple's iLife applications, especially iWeb and iWork you've seen this random chunk of Latin as dummy text. Having studied Latin for one painful summer, I was confused as to why I could never translate the text. That's because it's randomized and offer new words are added in as a joke. But, there's even more to the story.
Turns out, this text has a lot more history that I thought. According to lipsum.com, the text was from a copy of Cicero's de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil) written around 45 BC, and was first used in print by a 16th century printer.
What's amazing is not only how this tradition has survived for so long, but that it made the leap into digital printing.
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