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Many here probably already know about this, but Notes and Queries - in the Guardian and online - can be both hilarious and informative, and provide a forum for you to show off your knowledge! http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/0,5753,184276,00.html Probably the most relevant would be the Semantic Engimas section, but the rest are also cool.
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Great site alexis!! Thank you for sharing. I did go to the semantic enigmas page and though I dont know about why the letters are arranged so on a computer keyboard, I might have something on the old typewriters. I do believe I learnt about 'etaoin shrdlu' (hi eta!) in the Phrontistery site (or was it Quinion?). The old typesetters had the letters arranged as 'etaoin shrdlu' because these letters were the most commonly used letters in the language. And now, the phrase translates into gobbledygook. 
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The old typesetters had the letters arranged as 'etaoin shrdlu' because these letters were the most commonly used letters in the language.Not quite. The Linotype keyboards are set up different from typewriters. The typesetters would occasionaly make a mistake and would run finger across the keys and up would pop 'etaoin shrdlu' in the cast column of type - the typesetters eye was trained to spot the phrase and they could locate the error easily and remove it. The Linotype - invented by Mergenthaler - is from the days of "hot type" and isn't seen too much anymore.The print was clearer and pages looked better (said the old hot type & press reporter with a sigh.) I know The Lowell SUN and (I think) The New York Times still have hot type presses. http://mmd.foxtail.com/Archives/Digests/199712/1997.12.07.16.html Don't yell at me I tried Makeashorterlink but it didn't give me one although it said it had been created. I dunno' Anyways - this link is a forum and has displayes an entry re Linotype machines. They guy writing the entry has one in his garage! Or you can Dogpile "Merganthaler+Linotype" and get entries - one of which has a photo of a Linotype Have fun.
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hmm. my ears are burning...
formerly known as etaoin...
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Thanks a bunch, wow! I never did quite understand that very well. And words like, linotype and typesetter sat in some dark, cobwebby recess of my brain till I read your post. Went to your link (the author writes it as 'eatoin'; likely a spelling error), and then googled, to find this marvellously informative page. Do read on... http://pages.prodigy.net/jabeckpearce/poor_town/tales/etaoinshrdlu.htmAnd no, your link didn't send my page wide. I hope this doesn't. That snurl thing simply doesn't work for me 
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Thanks for that link, maahey! Refreshed my memories of days long gone. I was about six-years-old when I was first given my name in hot lead....and it was hot!
I later days I got a bit smarter - my family being a newspaper family I was put wise to a few tricks. i.e. : when I went to work as a reporter I did not lean over the blocks of type to see if it was infested with "type lice" and get squirted with printer's ink as the case was locked!
Nor did I go out looking for a left handed monkey wrench!
By the 1940s even the dumbest newcomer realized there was no such thing as "a bucket of steam."
By the way, printer's ink couldn't be washed off! You had to wait for it to fade away.
Ah, the good old days.
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re: "a bucket of steam."
and an early 'activity' of computer nerds, especially when de-bugging a bit of hardware, was to 'empty the bit bucket'
(ziff davis, a technical publisher, offered real bit buckets as a promo for subscribing to one of their PC magazines) they were 'half buckets" (semi circular) and designed to mount to a cubicle wall, or to sit on a desk and be used a pen jar.)
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The bit bucket was where the bits that disappeared off one end or the other of a word in a non-circular shift (right or left) or if there was an overflow or underflow due to an arithmetic operation of one sort or another. Overflows were errors but underflows were, IIRC, normal losses of least significant bits. Underflow bits could clog up the bit bucket just as well as any other kind of bit, though.
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I did an apprenticeship in machine typography - a lost art and a pretty worthless one in terms of job security these days! Here's a link to a picture of Mk III - I learned on one of these for a couple of months, and this was in 1973. The one I learned on was over 80 years old: http://www.bacchus-marsh.com/files/linotype.jpgPretty snazzy, huh? Since the lino went the way of the dino, just about the only contact I've had with them is when one has been chattering away in some museum-type situation. Generally the person operating it hasn't got the foggiest idea of how they work and has either front- or back-splashed it (things not lined up properly; molten metal in all directions). On at least three occasions in the past ten years or so I've wound up cleaning up a lino in one of these museum print shops, oiling the damned thing, greasing the cam axle, graphiting the disser bar and the spacebands, tightening up or replacing belts, repairing the magazine, cleaning the pot throat and then spending the rest of the day happily churning out people's names back to front. I'm sure they were backsplashed again the next day ... They were a really clever piece of kit. The Mergs were always more forgiving than the Intertypes. I've sent lines away on a Merg which cast okay which on the Intertype would have resulted in a bang and a fountain of molten type metal (which is lead, zinc and antimony, not just lead) coming up behind the mold wheel. As an apprentice, I used to have to cast the "pigs", the long skinny ingots of type metal which hung above the pot on a hook and were lowered into the pot by a ballcock arrangement pretty much the same as in your privy's cistern. A piecework operator could get through ten of them in a shift, and that's a lot of metal. A number of newspapers have one or two of them in operating condition to show visitors, but they are becoming rarer as the people who knew how to operate them retire. It's a shame that it's come to this, but that's the way things go I guess.
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Whew--that thing looks pretty complicated to me, CK. Glad I don't have to try and figure one out. A "disser bar"--interesting name! Explain if you have time, please.
becoming rarer as the people who knew how to operate them retire. It's a shame that it's come to this, but that's the way things go I guess.
Yep--same for steam locomotives, Crays (hi, tsuwm), or--what were early build-it-yourself radio kits called?--quartz radio, maybe? And that's just some things that have been in use in our lifetimes. Who among us could operate a crank telephone; or a crank car, for that matter? Bingley's scytalas certainly seem to have gone out of use!
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