Almost everybody on the Internet has come across placeholder text before; it's commonly used to show what the page would look like with text despite not having any yet. Quite often, this starts with lorem ipsum, and often goes on a tangent of irrelevant-seeming Latin words. So, what does this mean and why do we use it? Well, using any existing language as a filler would not be good, because it can accidentally get included as part of the text. So, the originators of the filler chose a dead language, Latin, to do the job, specifically one poem by the Roman poet Cicero about pain versus pleasure. At this point, generators take random clippings from that text and insert it for as much space as is needed. Fun fact: lorem isn't even a word in Latin, and neither are many of the other garbles of gibberish in there: they're actually fragments of words. For example, lorem ipsum is a shortening of qui dolorem ipsum; it's similar for many of the other words in the string of text.
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy philosophy, trivia, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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