- Etaoin Shrdlu
-
1.The twelve most frequent letters in the English language.
2.The twelve easiest letters to type on a Linotype
keyboard.
3.A "stop here" notation inserted by Linotype typists, after
a typing mistake had been made, to finish the line and to indicate
to the proofreaders that the line should be removed.
4.A phrase seen in newspapers and books printed before
the 1960's due to editing marks inserted by Linotype typists and
subsequently missed by the proofreaders.
5.A phrase used, in part or in whole, to represent ideas of the
mysterious or whimsical. Used as early as 1931 in a story by James Thurber,
'Etaoin Shrdlu' has since represented everything from nonsensical characters
to sentient machines and studies into artificial intelligence.
- Linotype
-
1.A hot lead typesetting machine invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler
and first demonstrated to the New York Tribune July 3, 1886. The
Linotype was innovative in the way that it brought together the
casting and composition parts of the printing processes into one
machine. Linotype was adopted by newspapers and book publishers
as a production standard until it was replaced in the 1960's and
1970's by phototypesetting systems.