“This continues at length and variously. This is not really Greek, but badly garbled Latin. It started life as extracted Cicero’s “De Finibus et Malorum” (“The Extremes of Good and Evil”), [full text blah blah blah] …”
translation:
“But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure? … [and so on]”
(i just did a websearch at Google using keywords “lorem ipsum translation”)
Welcome to the SDMB, and thank you for posting your comment.
Please include a link to Cecil’s column if it’s on the straight dope web site.
To include a link, it can be as simple as including the web page location in your post (make sure there is a space before and after the text of the URL).
http://patriot.net/~lillard/cp/cic.fin.html contains the Cicero document that has been referred to. There isn’t a direct example of all the terms according to Cecil’s article. The closest to it is item 31 of section 1:
Sunt autem quidam e nostris, qui haec subtilius velint tradere et negent satis esse, quid bonum sit aut quid malum, sensu iudicari, sed animo etiam ac ratione intellegi posse et voluptatem ipsam per se esse expetendam et dolorem ipsum per se esse fugiendum.
I don’t know latin, but I think this may shed some light on the discussion.
I had been intrigued for a long time. I thought I had struck gold when I read in a Windows oriented magazine the instructions on how to automatically fill spaces with the words of this beguiling tongue-twister. Unfortunately, It didn’t work.
Glad you like the site Tere! I took it upon myself to fix your links. You can find a little tutorial on vB Code here. Also you can use preview to see how your post will look like before you submit it.
