And now a word from your AI writer

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h of a piece...

Looks like a good replacement for Lorem Ipsum :)

I've personally heard Chomky use that trick to slip from a verifiable account of history to a rationalization for Communism. Professors really can have an easy ride through life on the willing backs of the workers and peasants.

-jsw

Yeah, except that I can picture copy editors huddling together to figure out if it's grammatically correct.

Poor Chomsky. Before he became political, he was considered to be a genius. Once you become overtly political, most of one half of the world will try to convince the rest of their half that you're an idiot. d8-)

I tried that on Lorem Ipsum, which is clearly miscopied Latin and retains hints of Cicero's eloquence. The key was that the original text was dolorem ipsum, pain/grief itself.

Perhaps he was an idiot by the ancient Greek meaning, one who rejects societal norms, but certainly not stupid. I wouldn't have challenged him.

AFAICT Lenin said useful "idiot" instead of "durak", Russian for a fool.

-jsw

Right. It's been so modified over the years that it's only vaguely Latin-like. Before the Internet, we had printed copies of "Lorem Ipsum" text that we copied from. We could get it in galley-proof form, in different typefaces, sizes, and column widths, which we would paste into "makeup" (mocked-up) pages to show how something would look in print, with illustrations, headlines, etc..

Once we started using word processors (I never had one at McGraw-Hill. I typed on a Royal manual office model.), writers saved blocks of it to copy-and-paste. Now, we just pick it up from a variety of free sources on the Web.

I was using it until I retired a year ago, when we did layout mockups of promotional copy and, rarely these days, magazine pages.

It was never more than a placeholder used in publishing.