The quick brown fox has a twitter account

July 6, 2014 10:02 PM

PangramTweets automatically finds and retweets tweets which include all of the letters of the alphabet.

More background:

"PangramTweets is a Twitter account created by American Dialect Society president Jesse Sheidlower that utilizes a bot to locate and automatically retweet tweets that use every letter of the alphabet."

Pangrams are sentences that use every letter of the alphabet.

Some are just the result of people mashing their keyboards:

"Episode nine ended like this? Asdfghjklqpwoeirutyzmxncbv"

but most seem unintentional:
"The next avengers movie should have iron man just fucking shit up in Iraq; maybe blowing up ISIS guys and their crazy ass followers. #heroes"

"Jade Watts, Jack Taylor and Bronze-Age Boats perform live here at Boutique on Thursday for our next instalment of Acoustic Sessions!"

posted by gingerbeer (37 comments total)

Finally!
posted by mazola at 10:32 PM on July 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

Detecting small-size pangrams is quite a basic programming exercise, but they are also very amusing to write for jokes.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 10:36 PM on July 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

Quite amazing how many of these happen by accident, considering I just spent five minutes writing this line and couldn't work out how to fit in 'x'.
posted by dontjumplarry at 10:43 PM on July 6, 2014 [16 favorites]

Quite amazing how many of these happen by accident, considering I just spent five minutes writing this line and couldn't work out ... on preview, jinx!
posted by LionIndex at 10:49 PM on July 6, 2014 [34 favorites]

Zany jokes or wretched quips vex Mefi blog.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:02 PM on July 6, 2014 [11 favorites]

I like this one:

SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THE “FRIENDZONE”. MAYBE YOU SHOULD JUST VALUE A WOMAN’S FRIENDSHIP AND QUIT EXPECTING THEM TO FUCK YOU. JESUS FUCK.

Seriously, that should be used for every font preview.
posted by iotic at 11:23 PM on July 6, 2014 [69 favorites]

I already ordered the Pizza Hut bitches.
posted by mrgrimm at 11:33 PM on July 6, 2014 [4 favorites]

For a second I assumed each letter could be used only once and was gonna be clever and realized the challenge was nigh insurmountable. In any event I tried anyway, and without further ado:

zany, this projecbdfgklmquvwx
posted by aydeejones at 11:33 PM on July 6, 2014 [4 favorites]

I just realized I'm avoiding bed despite being quite exhausted for the sake of trying to think up a witty pangram comment.
posted by dazed_one at 11:42 PM on July 6, 2014 [3 favorites]

I've got so many questions, but that's probably just because I have exactly zero idea what the fuck I'm doing.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 11:48 PM on July 6, 2014 [5 favorites]

Love the post title.
posted by bryon at 12:05 AM on July 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

As it happens, a month ago I wrote a quick pangram helper to sidestep my vexing failure to think up any jazzy ones
posted by ormon nekas at 1:13 AM on July 7, 2014 [6 favorites]

Pangrams in other languages

I like this one:

"Monsieur Jack, vous dactylographiez bien mieux que votre ami Wolf"
(Mister Jack, you typed much better than your friend Wolf)
[was used in the Swiss army to check the keyboard of typewriters before teletransmission]
posted by sebastienbailard at 1:49 AM on July 7, 2014 [4 favorites]

Some of these .....? .... has the letter "x" been sent to pergatory or excommunicated? Because I must be failing to see it. I love the letter "x" and, likewise, "z" and their many useful words.
posted by mightshould at 2:41 AM on July 7, 2014

Using the entire alphabet to write a tweet quickly becomes a zany venture. Extraneous words jammed in for the sake of a single letter. Shit.

And 140 characters!
posted by flippant at 2:46 AM on July 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Just want to say: Nevermind, I've had coffee now. No more sleepyz posting. Quitting thread now. kthx. By.
posted by mightshould at 2:47 AM on July 7, 2014

This is getting me curious as to what the shortest possible pangram is using all the letters in alphabetical order.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 3:47 AM on July 7, 2014

By Jove, my quick study of lexicography won a prize.
posted by fairmettle at 3:54 AM on July 7, 2014 [6 favorites]

Pangrams in other languages

Most of which are probably made up by whoever added them to Wikipedia...
posted by effbot at 4:08 AM on July 7, 2014

dactylographiez

That feels like cheating though.
posted by Panjandrum at 6:07 AM on July 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Jerry brush up against Elaine's breast. George see mannequin of Elaine naked and have sex with it. Mrs. Costanza masturbate to Matlock.

Okay, but I'm going to stick with the quick brown fox.
posted by The Bellman at 6:11 AM on July 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

One of my favorite things about following this account is how it gives me a window into some of Twitter's many alternate universes that I would never otherwise see.

Also, check out Anogramatran, which hunts down tweets that are anagrams of each other.
posted by Xalf at 6:18 AM on July 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

Can someone please create a twitter bot that finds and retweets haikus? PLEASE?
posted by Theta States at 6:25 AM on July 7, 2014

"Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs" is shorter than "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Which makes a few seconds of difference at 45 baud. (The other teletype test pattern in that image, RYRYRYRY, is useful because it sends alternating patterns of 01010 and 10101 in the 5-bit Baudot code and ensures that none of the selector bits are stuck).
posted by autopilot at 6:34 AM on July 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

Can someone please create a twitter bot that finds and retweets haikus? PLEASE?

Seems to be gone now, but somebody did make a bot that searched for seventeen syllable tweets and retweeted them ...
posted by iotic at 7:01 AM on July 7, 2014

I've always wanted one that found things that could be sung to the tune of the Gilligan's Island theme song. But autodetecting poetic meter is hard. (Syllable counts are okay if you've got a big enough dictionary, but stress patterns are much trickier to make plausible guesses at, because a lot of words are stressed differently depending on context.)
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:25 AM on July 7, 2014

My good friend Carl passed his quiz but was vexed by a kwyjibo.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:31 AM on July 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

The hardest part about writing a jokey pangram is finding a clever use for q, x and z.
posted by obscure simpsons reference at 7:35 AM on July 7, 2014

"Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" said Ed.
posted by 256 at 8:23 AM on July 7, 2014

I'm jonesing to participate, but, don't y'know, I'm not quite clever enough - all except Z.
posted by maryr at 8:45 AM on July 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Poetic:

When panic grips
& squeezes
Creeping up
From every side
I feel suspended
Like an extended nanosecond
Just before
The bomb goes off
& I hide
posted by gingerbeer at 9:31 AM on July 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

Also, in case anyone forgot, "This sentence has three a's, one b, two c's, two d's, thirty six e's, three f's, three g's, eleven h's, nine i's, one j, one k, three l's, one m, eighteen n's, twelve o's, one p, one q, eight r's, twenty six s's, twenty t's, two u's, five v's, seven w's, three x's, four y's, and one z" is the only sentence of that form that contains every letter in the English alphabet.
posted by effbot at 9:59 AM on July 7, 2014

"Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" said Ed.

"Bcfghjklmnopqrtuvwxyz" said Ed.
posted by inigo2 at 10:02 AM on July 7, 2014 [6 favorites]

"bceghjkmnpqrtuvwxyz," said Flo.
posted by 256 at 10:44 AM on July 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

"", said Abcdef G. Hijklmnopqrstvwxyz, of the Worcester Hijklmnopqrstvwxyzs.
posted by arto at 12:32 PM on July 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

"ʻAehiklmnopuw," said Ed in Hawaiian.
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:42 PM on July 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

I thought that was Mele Kalikimaka.
posted by maryr at 9:18 PM on July 7, 2014