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Grex Language Item 116: Pangrammatry
Entered by rcurl on Thu Jan 17 18:25:15 UTC 2002:

Pangrammatry is the practice of framing sentences containing every
letter of the alphabet. One that indulges in this practice is a
pangrammatist.

15 responses total.

#1 of 15 by rcurl on Thu Jan 17 18:26:56 2002:

  "John P. Brady gave me a black-walnut box of quite a small size."
     -William  Whitney's Century Dictionary, 1889

#2 of 15 by albaugh on Thu Jan 17 20:04:18 2002:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.

#3 of 15 by rcurl on Thu Jan 17 20:58:09 2002:

Source?

#4 of 15 by gelinas on Fri Jan 18 06:15:12 2002:

My mother gave me "The quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog" as a
typing exercise.  I don't know where she got it.

#5 of 15 by rcurl on Fri Jan 18 07:02:18 2002:

http://www.mozilla.org/quality/browser/bft/bft_browser_html_mix2.html

#6 of 15 by gelinas on Fri Jan 18 07:09:33 2002:

There is no 's' in the version on that page.

#7 of 15 by rcurl on Fri Jan 18 07:34:03 2002:

What a faux pas! I cited the page to illustrate how common pangrammatry
was, but did not see it was not a pangrammatism. 

But my hope was to see if others know other pangrammatisms -  and maybe
why people have made them up. However a search on pangrammatist on
the web is NOT helpful.

#8 of 15 by kentn on Fri Jan 18 13:13:25 2002:

Try searching for "pangram" and you'll find quite a few pages dedicated
to these sentences.  Some of them even list the sources/contributors (if
known).

#9 of 15 by davel on Fri Jan 18 15:33:24 2002:

I learned it as "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.".  I saw it
first when shopping for a typewriter, & at that time didn't see why anyone
had used that sentence.

#10 of 15 by rcurl on Fri Jan 18 19:51:15 2002:

Thanks, Kent. http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/home/ajcd/type/pangram.html lists
dozens of pangrams - in English, French, Dutch and otherwise. 

I learned about "pangrammatist" from a calendar block my daughter got
for Xmas, which gives a daily "forgotten word". The example it gave
was the  one I quoted in #1. 

The shortest one in English at the above URL has 29 letters:"Quick zephyrs
blow, vexing daft Jim.". Is there one with exactly 26?

#11 of 15 by kentn on Sat Jan 19 00:00:02 2002:

This page has a few 26 letter pangrams, although they contain some
pretty obscure words (if you can call them that):
http://einstein.et.tudelft.nl/~arlet/puzzles/sol.cgi/language/english/sente
nces/pangram
 
Such as: Phlegms fyrd wuz qvint jackbox.

Another page had this one, which makes a little more sense:
TV quiz drag nymphs blew JFK cox.

#12 of 15 by rcurl on Sat Jan 19 06:59:04 2002:

What drives people to do this? Are any of YOU  driven to do this?

Another questioin (alluded to above). The URLs found from searching
for pangrammatist in Google are 95%+ porn sites. It is apparently a
porn keyword. Why?

#13 of 15 by gelinas on Sat Jan 19 07:03:15 2002:

_everything_ is a porn keyword.

I'm driven to pun, and I love word play, but not at the letter level.

#14 of 15 by rcurl on Sat Jan 19 07:33:46 2002:

pangrammatry doesn't get any hits on Google - your first statement is
incorrect.

#15 of 15 by gelinas on Sat Jan 19 07:35:31 2002:

so they missed one?  don't tell them; they'll fix it.

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