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To return to Greek. I was interested to learn the use of the word ‘Greeking’ a few years ago (remember the saying ‘It’s all Greek to me’).
It seems to have been used for some centuries by printers, and refers to the setting of text which at first glance looks like words, but in fact cannot be read, being gibberish. On one account, a sixteenth century printer took the galley which contained a page of Cicero’s De Finibus, and deliberately scrambled it to make a type specimen book. Its use meant that since the dummy text was meaningless someone looking at it would not be distracted by reading it. The garbled text is still known as Lorem ipsum. (‘Lorem’ is not a Latin word.) In general, the purpose is to have dummy text so as to judge matters of layout, typography, and so on, without the distraction which would be caused if the text were legible.
Though the method arose when individual metal letters were set one by one in galleys, the principle, and the same garbled text, are still in use in modern computerized type-setting. (Click here to see the usual version of Lorem ipsum, and the original Cicero).
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