Strictly speaking, a pangram is a sentence that uses all the letters of the alphabet. One I remember from learning to type is:
"The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog".
This has the great virtue of making sense – sort of. A perfect pangram would use each letter only once. These are not common in English. One such is:
"Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz".
But this looks to me more like a string of nouns than a sentence. An initial letter pangram is a 26 word story with the initial letters of the words in alphabetical order. The Times Diary recently ran a lockdown competition about these, though no one really won. A favourite entry of mine was:
"Adam baked cakes. Diet evidently forgotten. Got hungry in Jane's kitchen. Looking massive now, obesity problem! Quickly realised should take up vegan wisdom. Xmas – yummy zucchini".
I worked on this with my grandchildren and they all produced creditable efforts. My best shot (after a ridiculous amount of time) was this extinction-themed effort:
"Animals beware! Carnotaurus! Diplodocus! Extinction fears grow higher. I just know lions might never outwit poachers. Questing respectfully, surely those urbane vets will x-ray your zebra."
In the end, I thought that writing reverse initial letter pangram might be easier. Here's my best attempt:
"Zoologists! Your x-rays were very useful to students. Routine questions permitted, once normally meeting locally. Kindly just inform house guests following every day contact beginning again".
...................................................
Enough, already! I'm turning to haiku – much less trouble, although even harder to create something effective. My first shot (virus themed) will appear next week.
Respond