Etaoin Shrdlu - Just My Type

[Jim Koepke]

Rusty wood? No, but some wood did show up on a rust hunting stop:

Wooden Type.jpg

Having once set type by hand and later experience in other print shops using photographic methods there is still a soft spot in my heart for printing related things. These were at 25¢ each so it was a rather light lift for my wallet.

Most people likely do not know the significance of etaoin shrdlu. Anyone care to guess?

jtk

[David Ragan]

Some kind of esoteric printing industry thing, like the Qwerty keyboard, etc?

[Stewie Simpson]

https://www.nytimes.com/video/inside...in-shrdlu.html

[William Adams]

I think I have it in this booklet: http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf --- if not, it was in a typeface terminology broadside which I think might still be up on scribd.

[Pete Taran]

Jim,

That looks like some nice monotype to me. It was very high in tin and antimony and makes a great sweetener for increasing the hardness of cast bullets. Not as good buy still great is type metal and softer still in linotype and the spacers that go with it. It's hotly sought after among guys that like to make bullets from wheel weights and other sources of soft lead.

[David Ragan]

Well, 30 minutes in YouTube is a sizeable investment.

So, I Googled it:

From Rinkworks.com:

Fun With Words
Letter Frequencies

Etaoin Shrdlu is a somewhat infamous phrase among language enthusiasts. It is pronounced "eh-tay-oh-in shird-loo" and is believed to be the twelve most common letters in English, in order of most frequently used to least frequently used. The expression came about from linotype typesetting machines. Were one to run a finger down the first and then second left-hand vertical banks of six keys on a linotype machine, it would produce the words etaoin shrdlu. Linotype machines were sometimes tested in this manner. Once in a while, a careless linotype machine operator would fail to throw his test lines away, and that phrase would mysteriously show up in published material. The full sequence is etaoin shrdlu cmfgyp wbvkxj qz.

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[Jim Koepke]

Jim,

That looks like some nice monotype to me. It was very high in tin and antimony and makes a great sweetener for increasing the hardness of cast bullets. Not as good buy still great is type metal and softer still in linotype and the spacers that go with it. It's hotly sought after among guys that like to make bullets from wheel weights and other sources of soft lead.

It had to be hard so it wouldn't mushroom in use. These are made of a hardwood species of which my brain is having trouble recalling. It may have been made from a few different wood species.

Etaoin shridlu is the 12 most used letters in their order of usage in the english language. Those letters were also arranged down the left side of the keyboard on a linotype machine. The operators would often run their fingers down the key rows to make the nonsense slug after a typing error to help find the mistake to remove. Another source told me it also sometimes happened if the machine jammed. It would dump a whole slug of nonsense before resetting.

I have seen a few linotypes in use at a newspaper and another publisher and also have seen the nonsense phrase in print in a local newspaper in my youth.

jtk

[Lee Schierer]

.

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[Ted Phillips]

I grew up in a small-town newspaper family. I remember that my Brother and I would run amok in the back shop of the newspaper office, race around the Linotype machines. Take scrap pieces of lead and bang on them with hammers, and generally have kid-fun. Those Linotype machines, as you saw in the video, used open crucibles of molten lead to feed the machine. I distinctly remember that sometimes these machines would "burp" and slosh molten lead all over the back wall of the shop.

Today, these facilities would get flagged as Superfund Hazardous Waste facilities by the EPA. Fortunately for the printing houses and newspapers, they trashed those machines by the early/mid 80s.