A pangram is a text using every letter of the alphabet. Any book is likely to contain the entire alphabet, so a pangram needs to be small in order to be remarkable.Every text is either a pangram or a lipogram. An isogram is a text that does not repeat a letter. An isogrammatic pangram is a perfect pangram. My favorite isogrammatic pangram (by Clement Woods)—a grammatically complete sentence using every letter of the alphabet exactly and only once—is
Mr. Jock, TV quiz Ph.D., bags few lynx.
I take this to mean that Mr. Jock, because he is pursuing a doctoral degree in television game shows, doesn't get much hunting done. If this is a stretch, grammatically, it is the shortest stretch of any perfect pangram I know of.
The problem with writing an isogrammatic pangram is that, in the alphabet we find a higher proportion of consonants to vowels than one is likely to find in normal English.
The isonym, then, is a text that doesn't repeat a word, for example Doug Nufer's novel Never Again.
The serial technique of twelve tone music, and the range of techniques available within that form, led to consideration of pangram that treated vowels and consonants separately. This led to 21 consonant poetry, and, to resolve the Y question in the simplest way, 20 consonant poetry and the less strenuous six vowel poetry. It is possible, using the technique of stuttering, to create a poem that is simultaneously a six vowel poem, a 20 consonant poem, and a taut if not perfect pangram.
The pangram is a practical form: it an be used to test your keyboard or to examine all the letters of a particular font. The sentence above is more expedient than "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" or "Pack my liquor box with five dozen jugs." Chris Mann offers the following:
XV quick nymphs beg fjord waltz.
Swear The Pangrammatic Oath
List Of Verbs To Do: a pangram written using only verbs
Vanilla Vagina Utopia: a transgram and pangrammatic abecederian telestich, in which the words are in alphabetic order and are all nouns ending with A
Nevermore: there is an old tradition in French and English logology to translate Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven into various forms. In this spirit, Nevermore is an isonym.
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| Dominique Fitzpatrick-O'Dinn © 1996-2007 Spineless Books |
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