ETAOIN SHRDLU

It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.
--Melvin Cowznofski

Any adult worth knowing -- at least any American adult -- read MAD Magazine as a youth.  And therefore, any adult worth knowing, with the same nationality qualification, remembers the meaningless phrase ETAOIN SHRDLU, found in various odd places in MAD's cartoon panels.  Just as Smokey Stover comics -- the pride of a slightly earlier generation -- were replete with wall decorations containing iconic phrases such as "Foo" and "Notary Sojac."

But those of us with any journalistic leanings quickly came to learn the true meaning of ETAOIN SHRDLU.  For others, yesterday's New York Times provided a refresher course.  Those twelve letters happen to be, in decreasing order, the twelve most frequently used letters in the English language.  And, more to the point, they also happen to be the first twelve letters on a linotype keyboard -- linotypes, for technical reasons I won't go into, because I don't know the reasons, used such a keyboard rather than the "QWERTY" keyboards with which we are familiar from our computers and/or typewriters.

What is a linotype?  Ah, my child.  Great hulking, noisy, moving machines that converted each line that you, the writer, had written into a solid lead line of type (a "slug") from which -- ultimately and indirectly -- a newspaper was printed.  As a sniveling, callow, high school newspaper editor, I hovered nervously every two weeks, ready to veto when necessary, as employees of the local city newspaper -- which served as our school newspaper's printer -- composed each page, fitting slugs into place on a composing table, based on our more or less approximate make-up diagrams.  The linotype machines were grinding away in the background, everywhere about us, and they were awesome!

But the important fact, for our purposes, was that once the operator began typing a line, there was no way to go back and correct it -- the beast was in motion, and the molten lead would be poured.  So, when he made a mistake, he slipped his finger over those first twelve letters.  When an editor ran across ETAOIN SHRDLU, he knew that the line was in error, and he had it pulled off the composing table.

Except, sometimes he didn't -- and the ultimate reader was treated to a line of gibberish, topped off with the puzzling name (the author, he might wonder?) of ETAOIN SHRDLU.  As a versifying journalist, writing for a Wisconsin newspaper, put it in 1903:

Some fiendish printer is my secret foe
  On the top floor.
He has a trick that fills me up with woe
  And oaths galore.
I wrote a sonnet to my lady’s hair
And said that “only with it can compare
etaoin shrdlu cmfwyp vbgkqj xgflflflfl.”
— This made me sore.

Modern technology caught up with the New York Times in July 1978, when it made its last use of linotypes.  And offered a final salute to ETAOIN SHRDLU, a phrase then entrusted to the care and handling of MAD Magazine.