Spoiler Saturday: The Pangram

Packing it all in as I pack it in.

A pangram is any piece of writing that includes all twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

Like some other forms of wordplay, this term is only meaningful in contexts where it’s impressive. You wouldn’t call a novel “pangrammatic,” because it’s not very impressive to use twenty-six letters in 10,000-50,000 words. Social-media posts, though, are often short enough for pangrams to be unusual, which is why the bot PangramTweets could be fascinating;

The only problem with following bots like this is…they make you read tweets. Oh, and they can stop working without warning: PangramTweets was active until April 2022.

For ages, word gamers have constructed pangrams using as few letters as possible—and, of course, the true minimum would be twenty-six. But most so-called “perfect pangrams” are on the imperfect side, in terms of readability or understandability:

Crwth vox zaps qi gym fjeld bunk. (Calvin Li)

Hm, fjord waltz, cinq busk, pyx veg. (Calvin Li)

Jink cwm, zag veldt, fob qursh pyx. (Stephen Wagner)

Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx. (Author unknown, AFAIK)

Zab, thy crwds vex jimp Qung folk. (Jeff Grant)

Only “Mr. Jock” is kinda gettable without a lot of hunting for definitions, and it’s a weird, dreamlike construction about a smartie who’s bad at big-game hunting. I like imaginative images, but this one’s a stretch. (Is a “TV quiz PhD” someone with a PhD featured on quiz shows, or someone who did their doctoral thesis on such programs?)

I’m also “meh” on the made-up name “Mr. Jock.” Other pangrams have created names like “Schwartzkopf-Jung” to eat up difficult letters, but that feels like a cheat. I guess “Mr. Jock” could instead be an insult? Is this quiz-show genius also an adrenaline-junkie athlete? That’s hard to picture. Almost a contradiction in terms.

I have found two perfect pangrams that seem more directed. One, by Steven Galen, refers to this cover…

GQ's oft-lucky whiz Dr. J, ex-NBA MVP.

The other was this bit of mid-2000s liberal chest-thumping by Meyran Kraus. It’s dated today but still paints a picture:

My kind zap Fox TV, squelch GWB Jr.!

I have yet to see other twenty-sixers that hold to this standard of meaningful, accessible, cheat-free language. (Scott Gardner came close with NBC glad. Why? Fox TV jerks quiz PM.)

This is subjective. I’m calling the above sentences “cheat-free,” but to other wordsmiths, acronyms and abbreviations are cheats…even common, well-known ones like “Dr.,” “Jr.,” “NBA,” and “TV.” They’d probably prefer something like Crwth vox zaps qi gym fjeld bunk, which uses only words approved by the Scrabble dictionary.

Chasing this sort of “perfection” has its drawbacks. There’s a tactile beauty in the old pangram standby, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. It’s 35 letters. You can “improve” it by turning either “the” into an “a,” reducing it to 33. But The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog or A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog…they just don’t sound right, do they?

Most of my favorite pangrams are of this “sweet spot” type. They’re short enough to be impressive, but long enough to make sense as real or imagined things.

Battle of Thermopylae: quick javelin grazed wry Xerxes.

Farmer Jack realized that big yellow quilts were expensive.

The five boxing wizards jump quickly.

The job requires extra pluck and zeal from every young wage earner.

And then there’s one pangram that was appropriate for many years, and now makes me a little wistful. RIP to a real one:

Watch Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek’s fun TV quiz game.

Tomorrow: Pangrams in crosswords.