My favourite viral video of the moment – and the one that perhaps best sums up the final triumph of the moving picture over the written word – is a home video of a dog standing rather dully as a small fox plays around it, then jumps over his back before running away. You don't need to see it; it's pretty much exactly what it says: A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. (Gentlemen, start your remixers: I want to see one techno, one hip-hop and one folk soundtrack for this video by the end of today.)
Here is the infinite-number-of-monkeys principle at work: You leave video cameras on around the world for long enough, and at some point you will by the law of probability capture a representation of a meaningless phrase – a phrase, that is, whose primary function is not to convey meaning, not to represent dogs or foxes or speed or otiosity, but to serve as a typing exercise or demonstration of typography. It's funny how this abstract set of words with an important place in the history of design loses its magic when it becomes actually visual.
What is magic about a holoalphabetic sentence, also known as a pangram – a sentence that includes all the letters of the alphabet? Well, first of all, those terms themselves are lovely; if you can find an excuse to say pangram at your next cocktail party, then I say indulge the urge. It is also an inherently funny word, particularly if repeated (try it, right now, 10 times).
Creating pangrams has two functions, one practical and the other ludic: They are useful to display the qualities of a typeface in a short space, and they are really fun to play around with as an intellectual and aesthetic exercise.
The most difficult game is to try to create a pangram that's a grammatical sentence but with the fewest possible letters. The smallest number of letters in such a pangram would be 26. A perfect, non-letter-repeating sentence like this is called a heterogram. Many such sentences have been created but they are not really coherent or even English: they require obscure and foreign words that don't use a lot of vowels. The Welsh word "cwm", pronounced koom, meaning valley, is of great use to those who would excel at this game, as are archaisms like vext for vexed. ("Zing, vext cwm fly jabs Kurd qoph!" – supposedly a newspaper headline referring to the sound made by an angry valley fly landing on an Asian alphabet letter, but, no, it doesn't really make sense.) You can also do it using abbreviations and proper nouns ("New job: Fix Mr. Gluck's hazy TV, PDQ!").
But I think all that is pushing the rules. To be good it has to be in intelligible English. The quick-brown-fox sentence has 35 letters if you write it beginning with "the" (not "a"), but you can get lower and still stay within the bounds of smaller dictionaries: "Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymph" has 27 letters, for example. If you try to avoid the newspaper-headline syntax the best you can do is about 30 letters ("Two driven jocks help fax my big quiz" is my favourite).
People play similar games on the word level, trying to create the longest English word that does not repeat a letter: they come up with things like uncopyrightable and misconjugatedly. And they try to find short words with all five vowels in them (like iouea, a species of sea-sponge – five letters, beating poet Christian Bök's book title Eunoia by a hair). I like queueing because it has five vowels in a row.
Why do we play these games – pangrams, anagrams, palindromes, lipograms (that's when you try to write, like Bök, without using certain letters)? What's the point (other than typographical display) of imposing constraints on this infinitely variable and expandable language? Because we start with constraints: We only have these 26 letters, which combine to make a certain limited number of sounds through which we represent infinite realities; the whole thing from the beginning is a game, an entirely different game from filming a dog and a fox with a video camera. Which is still cute to watch.