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The pangram pageWriting text that is meant to represent body type in layouts and type specimen books is probably the most difficult task a writer can ever be asked to undertake. Ideally, the text should contain examples of all the letters and sorts: in Roman, italic and bold and include a range of words of average length so that it looks right. Some designers use real or bogus Latin text, most often a famous piece of text that begins: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipscing elit, diam nonnumy eiusmod tempor incidunt ut labore et dolo ... These are, according to the FAQ of the newsgroup comp.fonts, the slightly jumbled remnants of a passage from Cicero's de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45BC, a treatise on the theory of ethics, which begins: Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit ... (There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.). This text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived letter-by-letter essentially unchanged except for an occational 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. Although Douglas de Lacey says it couldn't have been in use since 1500, since the first word depends on a page-break in the Loeb edition! He quotes from the Classics FAQ: 'The beginning of the First Catalinarian ("Quousque tandem abutere") has been used for centuries by printers to show the characteristics of fonts, while a laser printer of the late 1970s used a modified form of a page of the Loeb edition of his De Finibus for the same purpose (the well-known "lorem ipsum dolor" text)'. The nonsense Latin was as incomprehensible as Greek: so the phrase 'it's all Greek to me' and the term 'greeking' have common semantic roots! When short pieces of text are called for, we try to devise sentences containing all the letters of the alphabet with as few duplications as possible. These are called pangrams. The classic pangram used by typographers is: 'The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog'. Good score: all 26 letters of the alphabet in a 33-letter sentence that make sense. Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs is better, with one letter less. And Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex is better still. Another common albeit longer one is: How razorback-jumping frogs can level six piqued gymnasts! This one is not so good: In the vocation of typesetting, dexterity can be gained by means of quiet, judicious and zealous work. It is more appropriate to the printing trade, but comprises 83 letters! And what about this: Wherever civilization extends, the services of expert and judicious typographers and printers must always be quickly called upon. Is that grammatically correct? I don't think so. Or this: The bank recognizes this claim as quite valid and just, so we expect full payment. Hmm. Probably the shortest French pangram, at 29 letters, is: Whisky vert: jugez cinq fox d'aplomb. Another French one is: Zoe ma grande fille veut que je boive ce whisky dont je ne veux pas. Some pangrams of exactly 26 letters do exist, but rely heavily on the kind of obscure words that Scrabble players collect plus the odd Welsh and Hebrew words, such as cwm (a Welsh valley) and qoph (the 19th letter of the Hebrew alphabet) and, of course, proper nouns (which could in fact be made up from the left-over letters): Vext cwm fly zing jabs Kurd qoph is a good example. Here are some more, taken from The Oxford guide to word games by Tony Augarde (Guild Publishing, London 1984): Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz What we don't have yet are any examples of pangrams which (a) include
the standard typographic ligatures or (b) include accented characters.
If anyone knows of any examples, please let me know. Lots on pangrams and other word quirks on the fun-with-words website. More pangram info on Angus Duggan's Pangram Page.
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