Geoff Duncan

Almost anybody who has worked with typesetting—digital, column inches, or old-fashioned lead—is probably familiar with the Lorem Ipsum. In publishing, Lorem Ipsum is dummy text commonly used as sample "nonsense" material to fill space until "real" copy is available.

The actual text used as the basis of Lorem Ipsum is from one of Cicero's books on ethics, The Extremes of Good and Evil written (in Latin, naturally) about 45 B.C.—Google Book Search seems to have scanned the full text of Rackham's translation from 1914 online, although a few pages are munged. The text enjoyed a revival in the European Renaissance, and Lorem Ipsum was probably first used as sample text during the sixteenth century by printers making type specimen books. Spec books show off the various sizes and styles of lettering a particular printer or foundry has available. When you're planning to set an entire book or other significant text to paper, the choice of type can be very important; it's not enough to glance at the upper- and lowercase letters arranged a b c d across the page to make a decision: you need to see them in paragraphs, how the letters flow together, how common combinations of letters—like fi, fl, and ffi—appear on the page, how the type scales to different sizes and leadings (the amount of space between lines). It's not just the characters, but how they interact within text. Hence: Lorem Ipsum, dummy text which flows, more or less, like "real" text. Long words, short words, capitals, and common punctuation.

Lorem Ipsum got a boost into the digital age when Aldus included the text along with its category-defining desktop publishing program, PageMaker. (This was before Aldus's acquisition and absorption by Adobe—heck, even before there was a World Wide Web.) From there, the text easily made the transition to the Internet.

This sort of trivia aside, there are two things to know about Lorem Ipsum:

1. Many bastardized (and longer) versions of the text are floating around on the Internet, and while most of them seem just fine, many contain jokes or nasty surprises. You don't want to mock up a client's newsletter using some random Lorem Ipsum you found online only to have the client's eyes immediately fixate on a four-letter nasty in the middle of a paragraph, do you?

2. You should never, ever, see Lorem Ipsum in the wild. Outside the context of a computer-based publishing or design application, typesetting, a font book, or a classics library, the text should simply never appear in the real world.

So it is with considerable, nay, a tremendous sense of glee that I note that some of the package design professionals at home lighting and decor company Hampton Bay—which sells exclusively to Home Depot and Expo Design Centers—apparently don't know their Spanish from their Latin or their Lorems from their Ipsums. I'll give them some credit: many of the boxes for their ceiling-mount light fixtures feature names and descriptive materials in both English and Spanish…but the particular flush-mount ceiling light with motion sensor I picked up featured the words "Lorem Ipsum" in big, bold print above a sentence describing the mounting system.

(Hee hee!)

And there they were: dozens of boxes. Maybe in hundreds of Home Depots, and who knows how many thousands more in warehouses. I started giggling right there in the lighting aisle.

I guess no one at Hampton Bay got the memo that bilingual packaging means bilingual proofreading.

Update 28-Dec-2006

It appears this humble entry strained my credibility amongst some of these pages' Gentle Readers, particularly those in the graphic design communities. Say they: None amongst their austere profession would, through deliberate act or unknowing neglect, let such a thing come to pass! To assuage their concerns, dispel their disbelief, and defend my reputation—without casting aspersion upon their Hallowed Trade—I therefore offer photographic evidence of my assertions, obtained yesterday at a nearby Home Depot.

Hampton Bay Motion Sensor Flush Mount Fixture, product number 435 061

Detail of Hampton Bay light fixture packaging

And you thought I just make this stuff up. Sheesh. Still don't believe me? Click the images for larger versions.