Information About ™

Etaoin Shrdlu
  CATEGORIES ABOUT ETAOIN SHRDLU
   
english phrases
   
in-jokes
   
SHOPPER'S DELIGHT
 
Shop For:  
Department
Price Minimum:
Price Maximum:
      



, 1967 )]]
Because the letters on Linotype keyboards were arrayed by letter frequency, ETAOIN SHRDLU were the first two vertical columns on the left side of the keyboard. Linotype operators who had made a typing error could not go back to delete it, and had to finish the line before they could eject the slug and re-type a new one. Since the line with the error would be discarded and hence its contents didn't matter, the quickest way to enter enough letters to finish it was to run a finger down the keys, creating this nonsense phrase. If the slug with the error made it as far as the compositors, the distinctive set of letters also served to quickly identify it for removal. Occasionally, however, the phrase would be overlooked and get printed erroneously.

This happened often enough that the ETAOIN SHRDLU is listed in the '' Oxford English Dictionary '' and in the ''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.

It also became part of the lore of newspapers. A documentary about the last issue of ''The New York Times'' to be composed in the hot-metal printing process ( July 2 , 1978 ) was entitled ''Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu''.

The complete 26 letter sequence ( Pangram ) is usually listed as ''ETAOIN SHRDLU CMFWYP VBGKQJ XZ''. One of the many Anagram s of ETAOIN SHRDLU is "South Ireland".


APPEARANCE OUTSIDE OF TYPOGRAPHY



Fiction

  • Elmer Rice 's 1923 play '' The Adding Machine '' had Etaoin Shrdlu as a character.

  • ''Etaoins'' is used in Thurber 's 1931 ''Owl in the Attic'' to indicate the incompetence of a Linotyper.

  • In 1942 it was the title of a short story by Fredric Brown about a sentient Linotype machine. (A sequel, ''Son of Etaion Shrdlu: More Adventures in Typer and Space'', was written by others in 1981.)

  • Etaoin Shrdlu is a character in Max Shulman 's novel of college life, ''Barefoot Boy with Cheek'' ( 1943 ).

  • Anthony Armstrong's 1945 whimsical short story "Etaoin and Shrdlu" ends "And Sir Etaoin and Shrdlu married and lived so happily ever after that whenever you come across Etaoin's name even today it's generally followed by Shrdlu's".

  • It was the name of an irascible bookworm in Walt Kelly 's comic strip '' Pogo ''.

  • The O Ucla ! O Etaoin Shrdlu! O Escrow Beryllium ! Pandit J. Nehru !"''

  • In 2005, the web comic '' Girl Genius '' introduced a variation of the phrase as the names of two otherworldly characters, Eotain and Shurdlu.

  • Emile Mercier , Australian cartoonist of the 1950s would sometimes incorpoate the word Shrdlu into his texts.



Non-fiction

The writer Denys Parsons wrote several books compiling misprints from publications (''It Must be True'', ''Can It Be True?'', etc.) in which a character called Gobfrey Shrdlu was supposedly responsible for all such occurrences.


Computing

SHRDLU was used in 1972 by Terry Winograd as the name for an early artificial-intelligence system in Lisp . In Douglas Hofstadter 's '' Gödel, Escher, Bach '', there is a dialogue between fictional programmer "Eta Oin" and SHRDLU.

The ETA Programming Language uses the letters E, T, A, O, I, N, S and H as commands and ignores the rest.


Music

The phrase was used as the title for a piece by the band Cul De Sac on their 4th album ''Crashes To Its Light, Minutes To Its Fall'', in 2000. The band also released a piece by the name of ''Etaoin Without Shrdlu'' on a live recording titled ''Immortality Lessons'' in 2002.


OTHER LANGUAGES

The French version of this twelve letter combination, "elaoin sdrétu", was used as the name of a robot in the ''Petit Noël'' comics of André Franquin .


SEE ALSO



EXTERNAL LINKS