"De finibus bonorum et malorum" is a work by the philosopher Cicero from around 45 BC. It's Latin for "On the ends of Good and Evil." (Finibus like finish, bonorum like bonus, malorum like malice). It's a set of dialogues concerning 3 main lines of philosophy at the time: Platoism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism. I will leave the differences for others to discuss. So "De Finibus" is Cicero walking readers through philosphy.

His works remained popular long after his death, even across centuries. For example, the United States Founding Fathers kept loving him. In his May 1825 letter to Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson cited him amongst others to be authors of the elementary books of public right. John Adams describes reading Cicero as "contribut[ing] much to Health." So Cicero remained popular, similar to Agatha Christie now.

Anyways, we jump to around the 1980s. The person who had the Eureka moment and made the connection was a professor named Richard McClintock of Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He wanted to find a rare Latin word that was in the standard Lorem Ipsum and lo, found it in Cicero. His theory is the current use was done by a typesetter in the 1500s(As the discoverer, he gets to makes these theories) who intentionally used a non-Vulgate text and scrambled it up.

Now why would a typesetter intentionally mix up text? To focus on the layout style on his product. If a man is showing you various lengths of wire, it is usually not good practice to point to the spaceship behind him if he wants to retain your attention. Humans get distracted easily.

Now why specifically "Lorem Ipsum" is called that? As any traditional Catholic will tell you, Latin phrases from the beginning of documents name it, their incipits. So in the 1914 Loeb Classical Library edition of the work, there was a page cut on the phrase "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." Guess where the text lept up to the top of the next page. And guess what was hyphenated. Earlier editions were set up similarly as far as I can tell.

Now enter techonology. If you're focusing on formatting a website, you need a comparison text. And humans really don't change tradition. I'm afraid my speciality doesn't include this realm of graphic design but the aforementioned source says the passage was used on Letraset papers by graphic designers to cut and paste onto whatever the person was formatting. And when computers came into the equation, one of the first programs used it. And the tradition stuck. And for good reason.

Since no one outside of the Church, law and medical schools, high schools, and universities (and even most of them inside said institutions) uses Latin, it forces the reader to look at the format and presentation style instead of being distracted by the placeholding text. Despite 500 years, the human nature of curiosity has not changed that designers can't trust us to pay attention.