The disgruntled consumer who tweeted “My ‘prize’ in my Cracker Jack box…whoever does quality control needs to get fired” accidentally did something miraculous. This message includes all 26 letters of the alphabet, making it a pangram. The twitter feed @PangramTweets shares random pangrams from around the internet. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Pangram Tweets”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette, and it is quiz time.
Oh, no.
Just a little one.
Okay.
Okay.
I have a couple of tweets that I’m going to read to you.
These are actual tweets, and I want to see if you can guess what they have in common, okay?
Oh.
Here’s tweet number one.
Job seeker tip. When customizing your cover letter, relate your qualifications and experience to the needs of the company you’re applying to.
Okay, that’s tweet number one.
Tweet number two is, my prize in my Cracker Jack box, whoever does quality control needs to get fired.
Oh, I know.
You do?
Do you know?
Yes, they have.
Do you know?
Each of these tweets has all the letters of the alphabet.
Oh, my gosh.
Right?
Oh, my gosh, yes.
And there’s a name for that.
Pan-gram tweets.
How did you know this, Grant?
Oh, my gosh.
I read the blogs.
I also follow about 600 people on Twitter who specialized in language and puzzles.
I can’t believe you got that.
No, but those are really good.
They’re really good, right?
And these are accidental, right?
Yes.
They weren’t written to kind of fakely include the letters.
They just happened to be real.
I’m so impressed that you got that.
I’m a man of the world.
You know, Twitter has reached my part of the continent.
Oh, that’s right.
There’s a whole Twitter feed called Pangram Tweets.
Yeah, it’s super awesome.
Run by Jesse Scheidler.
Right, yeah.
Former North American editor for the Oxford English Dictionary has this program that actually searches Twitter, searches the fire hose of Twitter content to find these tweets that accidentally have all the letters.
And it’s really weird.
I mean, these are pangrams like the one that you use in typing class about the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy sleeping dog.
But yeah, as you said, these just happen to pop up.
Like, Queen Elizabeth presents Angelina Jolie as an honorary dame for work to end war zone sexual violence.
That has all the letters.
And the thing is, if you read that feed, it’s sort of weirdly, I don’t know.
They have something in common, but they don’t.
It’s sort of like all the people on an airplane.
You know, do you ever look around on an airplane and think, well, you know, we’re never going to be here together again in the same way.
But we have something in common.
We’re all going to Phoenix.
Yeah.
There’s something that we share that we don’t know what it is that we all need to be in Phoenix.
Yes, exactly.
And so we’re going to scatter at the airport.
I really recommend this Twitter feed.
This Twitter feed is called Pangram Tweets.
That’s P-A-N-G-R-A-M.
Yeah.
And their characteristic is that they contain all the letters of the alphabet.
Yeah.
Accidentally.
Yeah.
And it’s just kind of fun to check in on every once in a while.
Well, this is a show about words and language, the goofy stuff, the fun stuff, puzzles and questions and quizzes and riddles.
We’ll take your calls at 877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org.
