Etaoin shrdlu
ETAOIN SHRDLU is the approximate order of frequency of the twelve most commonly used letters in the English language, best known as a nonsense phrase that sometimes appeared in print in the days of "hot type" publishing due to a custom of Linotype machine operators.
Linotype history
As the letters on Linotype keyboards were arranged by letter frequency, ETAOIN SHRDLU were the first two vertical columns on the right side of the keyboard, after the special characters. Linotype operators who had made a typing error could not easily go back to delete it, and had to finish the line before they could eject the slug and re-key a new one. Since the line with the error would be discarded and hence its contents didn't matter (and since the line needed to be filled to successfully pass through the casting unit), the quickest way to enter enough letters to finish it was to run a finger down the keys, creating this nonsense phrase.
Operators could correct an assembled line of matrices in the assembler by rearranging them by hand, or by picking out individual matrices ("mats") to "delete" a character, temporarily placing the rejected mats in a tray attached to the machine for this purpose. In the example on this page, the operator wanted to return an "m," a spaceband and an "e" to the machine, so after casting the final line of the story he placed the rejects in the empty assembler, filled the line by running a finger down the keys (with a spaceband between each line), added a few em spaces, and sent the line of mats through. Such lines would normally have been caught by the proofreaders or compositor.
If the slug with the error made it as far as the compositors, the distinctive set of letters 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 (2 July, 1978) was entitled Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu.
The Linotype keyboard had the following alphabet arrangement given twice, one for lower-case and once for upper-case letters, with extra keys for numbers and symbols located between the two cases:
- etaoin / shrdlu / cmfwyp / vbgkxj / qz
Appearance outside typography
Computing
- SHRDLU was used in 1972 by Terry Winograd as the name for an early artificial-intelligence system in Lisp.
- The ETA programming language uses the letters E, T, A, O, I, N, S and H as commands, and ignores the rest.
Fiction
- Elmer Rice's 1923 play The Adding Machine had Etaoin Shrdlu as a character.
- Etaoins is used in James Thurber's 1931 Owl in the Attic to indicate the incompetence of a Linotyper.
- Mr. Etaoin is a character in Charles G. Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935). He is the proofreader of the local newspaper, characterized as "[a] corrector of errors."
- In 1942 it was the title of a short story by Fredric Brown about a sentient Linotype machine. (A sequel, Son of Etaoin 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.
- Emile Mercier, Australian cartoonist of the 1950s, would sometimes incorporate the word Shrdlu into his text.
- Ogden Nash's poem Peekabo, I Almost See You includes this description of a visit to an optometrist:
- And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP, and you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? and he says one set of glasses won't do.
- You need two.
- A short story in Thomas Pynchon's Slow Learner compilation has a character named Etienne Shrdlu.
- The Harvard Lampoon's The Lord of the Rings parody Bored of the Rings (1969) includes the phrase as part of some Elven poetry: "O Nasa O Ucla! O Etaoin Shrdlu! O Escrow Beryllium! Pandit J. Nehru!"
- Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) includes a dialogue between fictional programmer "Eta Oin" and the artificial-intelligence program SHRDLU.
- It is drawn in block letters in Rex Miller's book Slob by detective Jack Eichord, as a way to concentrate on the facts of the "Lonely Hearts Killer" case.
- In 2005, the web comic Girl Genius had two otherworldly characters, Eotain and Shurdlu.
- In the Black Hole Travel Agency novels by Jack McKinney, Etaoin Shrdlu is the elusive author of the Worlds Abound science fiction novels.
- Some of cartoonist Robert Crumb's stories for "Weirdo" feature a haggard character named Etaoin Shrdlu.
- Etaoin Shrdlu is a minor character in the novel Psychoshop by Roger Zelazny and Alfred Bester.
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 (with a Welsh wife called Cmfwyp and a son called Etaoin) was supposedly responsible for all such occurrences.
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.
- There is a Macedonian demo band called Etaoin Shrdlu.
- In The Complete Charlie Parker On Verve, the four following titles: JATP BLues, Blues For Norman Jam Blues and The Opener are credited to Shrdlu and The Closer is credited to Etaoin.
Miscellaneous
- Herb Caen claimed that the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper was nicknamed the Etaoin Shrdlu because of its questionable production standards.
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.