pangram

the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

The Pangram, or "pan gramma" from the Greek meaning "every letter", is a sentence using every letter of the alphabet at least once. Pangrams are most commonly used to display typefaces. The most popular pangram in the English language would probably have to be the title above, but to my surprise today there are tons of pangrams available.

After combing through piles of pangram junk, I finally put together a short narrative with all 10 of my favorite pangrams.

I sat quietly nervous on my first day of class. First days were always my worst.

“Who am taking the ebonics quiz?”, the prof jovially axed. I looked around wondering if I was the only one hearing correctly. But before I could answer my own question I saw the lazy major was fixing Cupid’s broken quiver in a day-dream.

Suddenly I awoke to the sound of my name and quickly gave the first answer that popped in my head, what is "amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes." The whole class sat silent for a moment, than erupted in to laughter like a bomb going off in my ears. My face fell flush with embarrassment.

After class my professor stopped me, and with his slow southern drawl said, "playing jazz vibe chords quickly excites my wife." But you don't want to hear that, and I don't want you sleeping in my class. If I catch you sleeping again I'm going to ask you to "Quickly, open your jaw and guzzle this laxative before me," understood?

Well I think that went well.

On the way home I saw that a crazy biker roughed up Steve McQueen’s flexed jaw. Not his actual jaw, since Steve McQueen is dead, but rather a billboard of him. Too bad, I thought, I always liked that picture of Steve.

My stomach growled, food is what I needed, and the sign up ahead read "Pablo’s dazed Mexican taqueria: just take Highway Five." Lucky me, the first and only time I tried Pablo's tacos I was sick for the next three days. I hated tacos anyways, so home cookin' it is.

I think my sister gets paid to watch MTV, she never turns the damn thing off. To my dismay I am stuck hearing what goes on in the world of pop-culture. "Joaquin Phoenix was gazed by MTV for luck" I heard the talking head exclaim. And funny, I thought, since he seems to be doing fine on his own.

Finally some peace and quiet, time to hit the books. My first test in my typography class was over kerning. A case study in my book said that AJAX and AVEDA labels require much of a type kerning wiz, seeing as how they both use the diagonal letters A and V. But the thing I found most interesting was how Macintosh used the pangram "cozy lummox gives smart squid who asks for job pen" in post-System 7 computers for font sampling.

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