No, the headline isn’t a typo. It’s not the name of some Welsh professional hangman player, either. I didn’t let a cat walk across my keyboard. I also didn’t let a bird walk across my keyboard. Nor did I let a lizard walk across my key—point is no animals were involved in the making of this headline.
What was involved in the making of this headline? Roughly 141 years of printing history!
WAIT
Don’t click off just yet. I promise the excerpt isn’t clickbait. I will reveal my SHOCKING strategy for winning EVERY game of hangman you EVER play. You just have to be patient. Now, where were we? Ah yes…
A long time ago (586 years) in a far away land (Germany), there lived a young (46 year old) man called Johannes. One day, Johannes decided he wanted to get involved in speculative investing, and lost a bunch of money in the bear market of polished metal mirrors.
No matter, a little mirror rug pull could not bring fear, uncertainty, or doubt to Johannes’ heart; for Johannes had a new idea. An idea so brilliant, so profound, so downright intellectual that children would be learning about him from items created by his invention for centuries to come.
That’s right, our Johannes is of the Gutenberg variety, and his idea was the printing press.
Now, Gutenberg’s press was pretty damn cool—hell, it helped launch a whole religious movement—but it had one big problem: typesetting was a pain.
In order to print a page on a genuine Gutenberg, the pressman would have to go rooting through a case of lettered blocks and arrange them on a matrix backwards and reversed.
Now, this was no problem at first—after all, the tedium of placing blocks on sticks is nothing compared to having monks copy books by hand—but as literal centuries passed by and demands for print increased, it became clear that the method needed improvement.
So, in 1886, along comes another German cutie to revolutionize the printing scene.
At the ripe old age of 22, Ottmar Mergenthaler invented the Linotype machine. As a watchmaker, Mergenthaler was sure to make the Linotype’s inner workings as complicated as possible, but it essentially worked like this:
An operator would sit at a special keyboard and type a line of text. A mold of each letter, space, and symbol in the line would be released from a storage magazine; then liquid lead would then be poured over the molds to create a cast of the line, called a slug.
Linotype was an inelegant solution. The machines were loud and dirty, and, oh yeah, super hot because they had a core of molten lead! But they did the damn thing so well that presses were using them, unchanged, up until the late 1970s. Just like handset type, though, seemingly overnight the Linotype fell by the wayside, replaced by computers.
But what does any of this have to do with hangman? And who is Etaoin Shrdlu? Well, remember how I told you Linotype machines have special keyboards? Those special keyboards look like this:
Spot the left-most vertical lines? E-T-A-O-I-N S-H-R-D-L-U. Linotype didn’t have a backspace ability; if you messed up, you had to finish out the line. So, Linotype operators would typically run down the two left-most vertical lines to signal to pressmen that the slug needed to be discarded. Sometimes this would be overlooked, and the phrase ‘etaoin shrdlu’ would appear in print.
Now, E-T-A-O-I-N S-H-R-D-L-U aren’t the left-most vertical lines for no reason. Linotype keyboards were arranged according to approximate letter frequency, a.k.a. how often they appear in the English language. That makes E-T-A-O-I-N S-H-R-D-L-U the 12 most common letters.
That’s why a good hangman player makes their first guesses in etaoin shrdlu’s order; they are, statistically, your best bets. And this trick isn’t reserved only for English speakers. Many languages had their own versions of etaoin shrdlu. The French version, for example, is elaoin sdrétu.
You also don’t need to rely on Linotype keyboards at all, just look up your language’s letter frequency chart and try to memorize the first handful. The only issue with this is that you might have a hard time memorizing an unpronounceable string (but that’s a story for another day).
So there you have it, now you can win hangman AND printing press themed trivia night. That’s sure to draw in the ladies.
Featured image created by Helena Swiderski.
