Today he is all but forgotten, but there was a time when Etaoin Shrdlu showed up daily in newspapers across the U.S. His name most often appeared in the dense columns of classified ads or in business listings, but it also popped up in stories about political intrigue, society soirees and gruesome crimes. In 1922, The Lawrence Daily Journal identified Shrdlu as a railroad union kingpin. Three years later, The Chicago Daily Tribune listed him as a boy soprano at a major music festival. In 1929 The Newark Advocate referred to Shrdlu as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany.
The breadth of Shrdlu’s athleticism, alone, was impressive. The Pampa News had him playing football for Yale. The Bakersfield Californian listed him among promising heavyweight boxers. The San Antonio Express lauded his local dominance in ten-pin bowling. According to the Washington Post, Mr. Shrdlu umpired the Midget Sandlot title game of 1923. He was a jock of all trades.
Despite his many gifts, Shrdlu had his demons. The New York Times associated him with a series of brutal Klan beatings in Tulsa. The Washington Post named him in an article about a schoolgirl’s kidnapping in 1926. Three years later, the New York World dropped his name in a piece about “secret debauchery” in Washington, DC.
For the better part of a century, readers were presented with—and baffled by—Etaoin Shrdlu’s oft-reported exploits. But the name wasn’t actually a name at all. It was purposeful gibberish that came about because of the invention of the linotype machine, a method of “hot metal” typesetting that revolutionized the newspaper industry in the late 19th Century.
This new technology allowed typesetters to assemble complete lines of type at once, rather than composing them, letter-by-letter, out of precast fonts. By punching the keys of the linotype machine, an operator could cast a horizontal slug of type in a lead-based alloy. This slug could be used and then melted down and reset again and again. This streamlined process allowed daily newspapers to expand beyond eight pages for the first time.
The typical linotype keyboard had 90 keys—which allowed upper- and lower-case letters, numerals, punctuation marks and an assortment of symbols. When operators made a mistake in composing a line, they would complete the slug and mark it for discarding, running one finger down the first two columns of keys. This would create the nonsense words etaoin shrdlu—a set of letters that would be easy for a proofreader to spot and discard before the page went to print.
With the time pressures of printing a daily, though, the nonsense letters often slipped through to the print edition—and the baffling name Etaoin Shrdlu would be mumbled over breakfast grapefruit halves from Coronado to Kennebunk.
The name became an inside joke in the newspaper trade, which only bewildered readers more. Shrdlu became a character in short stories, novels and plays. Etaoin Shrdlu was a recurring bookish character in Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip. Frank Colby’s grammar column “Take My Word for It” often cited his erudite assistant Dr. Etaoin Shrdlu as the final authority in all matters linguistic. A Chicago Daily Tribune humorist endorsed “the Hon. Etaoin Shrdlu” as a candidate for mayor in 1931, based, in part, on Shrdlu’s call for “bigger and better unemployment.”
Shrdlu was a running joke that technology eventually outran. The linotype gave way to offset printing. That, in turn, was supplanted by digital typesetting. In this age of new media and dying dailies, Shrdlu’s name is as archaic as newsprint slapping concrete in the pre-dawn hours.
In August 1974, Etaoin Shrdlu made his final appearance in the pages of The Los Angeles Times. His name popped up in a classified ad about a “picture perfect story book” bungalow for sale in Woodland Hills. That’s where I like to imagine him living still: It is late afternoon and an ancient Mr. Shrdlu—stoop-shouldered and silver-haired—hobbles across his “super new plush carpet,” out to his back deck “shaded by huge pine trees.” He looks wistfully down at the traffic snaking along Ventura Boulevard between the billboards and mini-malls. He stands a moment leaning on the rail and remembers those long-forgotten days when his name was as ubiquitous as Lucky Strikes. Then he sighs and goes back inside to tweet about it.