Since this issue hits mailboxes the day after April Fool’s Day, I thought I should write a silly column. And there is not much sillier than the “stuff” we scatter throughout the Cook County News-Herald that the reader never sees. Or that the reader hopefully never sees.
The “stuff” is temporary placeholders that we use while laying out the paper. If we are working on an ad and we have almost all the details we need, except for perhaps some language such as “Sale this week on grapefruit” we don’t want to hold up the whole process for that one little phrase. So, we substitute something that will “hold” the space until the real text arrives. We type in something temporarily silly, such as “A fabulous sale on shoestrings.”
Or, for the News-Herald’s reporters—we may be waiting to get a call back from a government official to confirm or deny or clarify a comment made in a meeting. We don’t want to wait on a 900- word news article for one little phrase, so we type up our notes, substituting something silly in place of the real quote we hope to receive before deadline.
I generally write something like this: “I am government official so-and-so and I will give some kind of quote about the discussion at the meeting on Thursday afternoon. It will be brilliant or perhaps boring. This should fill enough space until I get the real thing. Bibbity-bobbity-boo.”
One of my greatest fears is that someday our proofreading will fail and we will go to press with a silly filler in an ad or article. It happens. That is why the Tonight Show’s Jay Leno has a whole routine on Monday nights called Headlines. I shudder when I see some of the things that make it to print. I know they were intended as funny little in-house jokes to hold space that somehow slipped past proofreaders to the presses.
News people and graphic designers would be wise to use the industry standard filler— Lorem ipsum.
I remember the first time I saw Lorem ipsum in an ad with a lot of yet-to-be written copy. I figured out that it was “filler” to show how the text would fit in the ad layout. But what language was it? I didn’t recognize the copy: lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit as German or French or Spanish. So I asked, “Is that Greek or Latin?”
I was close. My advertising agency friend explained that it was not Latin, although it did look like it. She said it was “greeking,” a nonsense filler with “words” that uses the letters of the alphabet in approximately the same frequency of letters of the alphabet in English.
It works, except lorum ipsum doesn’t factor in the acronyms we commonly use. Lorum ipsum is believed to have originated in 1500, long before the acronyms came to be. We never write a story without an acronym or two—or five. Lorum ipsum dolor EDA sit amet SWCD consectetur, adipisci Mn/DOT velit just doesn’t look right.
So we’ll continue making up our own gibberish. In the 11-plus years I’ve been doing this, we’ve never missed replacing our lorum ipsum fillers. But if we ever do, I’m sure Leno will love it. When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.
Cynthia Heimel
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