Excursus

Though this is a blog about the technology of writing (primarily advocating the use of plain text alternatives over proprietary formats), I sometimes post about its history. Recent posts about “-30-” have led to another historical excursus.

A comment on a post on Metahacker correctly claimed that the origin “-30-” was more “on the news gathering side and not in the type shop”, but wrongly suggests that “SHRDLU” was used by linotype operators to mark the end of the line. Concerning this there is no mystery, though with the passing of the linotype machine “ETAOIN SHRDLU” is less and less familiar.

Here we need only consult the Oxford English Dictionary:

The letters set by running a finger down the first two vertical banks of keys on the left of the keyboard of a Linotype machine, used as a temporary marking slug but sometimes printed by mistake; any badly blundered sequence of type. Also ellipt. etaoin. Cf. SHRDLU.

1931 J. THURBER Owl in Attic III. vii. 135 The author sends in a manuscript without exclamation marks. The linotyper puts them in, the author takes them out in proof, the linotyper puts them back in, together with a couple of etaoins. 1967 Listener 15 June 793/2 What I love about newspapers is their etaoin shrdl. 1983 Daily Tel. 13 Sept. 12/4 ‘Lot of pleasure but also a lot of pleasure but also a lot of anxiety and heart-searching.’ etaoinshrdlu cmfwyp shrdlu cd showed that cinema and per- Mrs Nissel said that the study forming arts ticket prices had more or less remained in line with the Retail Price Index up to 1975/76.

Conceived by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1883, the linotype machine used 91 keys to create an entire line of metal type (hence, “line of type”, subsequently, “linotype”). Typesetting and composition on a linotype machine was much more efficient than Gutenberg’s method of handset composition.

Unlike QWERTY keyboards, the linotype machine’s keyboard was based on the approximate order of frequency of the letters used in the English language. The first two vertical rows of the keyboard consisted of the sequences ETAOIN SHRDLU—the twelve most commonly used letters in English. (Caveat Lector: I haven’t checked how good an approximation this is.)

Mistakes happen, even among linotype operators. Given the assembly mechanism, it was faster and easier to cast a bad slug, than to handset the line. To signal a mistake for the proofreader, the linotype operator would fill out the line with random characters by running his fingers down the keys, known as a run down. This would frequently result in the sequence etaoinshrdlu. Mistakes happen, and sometimes they are multiplied—etaoinshrdlu occasionally made its way into print. World Wide Words provides the following example:

Mad Magazine used this sequence as nonsense words, and this inspired Terry Winograd, who read Mad Magazine in his youth, to name his program for understanding natural language SHRDLU.