A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. The Twitter feed @PangramTweets uses a bot to scour the internet for pangrammatic tweets, providing a weirdly wonderful window on what people write. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Pangrams”
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. Here are a couple of tweets that showed up in my Twitter feed.
One of them goes, how to become sober instantly. Mix three tablespoons of raw apple cider vinegar into 16 ounces of orange juice and drink quickly.
A gross.
Okay.
B, what does that have to do with language?
Let me give you another tweet.
My body just been taking any opportunity to detox since I quit smoking. I sweat like crazy for every little thing and use the bathroom 24-7.
Oh, I know.
Light bulb.
Right.
Both of those tweets have every letter of the alphabet.
You always guess this.
I don’t always guess it.
Every time I try these on you, you always guess that.
But yes.
But the reason I know this is because I know the guy who made those tweets happen in your feed.
Yes, it’s from the Twitter feed Pangram Tweets by your colleague Jesse Scheidlauer.
Right, who used to work for the Oxford English Dictionary.
And he somehow set up this bot that goes all over the web and scours it for tweets that contain every single letter of the alphabet.
So far more interesting than the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy sleeping dog, you get things like that.
And they’re called Pangrams.
Pangrams.
And it doesn’t mean only the 26 letters because some of them are duplicated more than once.
But they’re in there at least once.
At least once, yes.
I’ve seen people complaining that they should only have each letter one time.
But that’s nearly impossible to do.
No, that’s too hard.
Yeah, that’s too hard.
That’s too hard.
But Pangram Tweets is this weird keyhole view of the Internet.
You just see all this weird stuff coming in that’s united by this one thing.
Every single one of them has 26 letters.
So I highly recommend it just for a little fun in your feed.
Yeah, you can find out more.
Just go to at Pangram Tweets on Twitter, and you can have a lot more language from us.
We talk about linguistics, slang, new words, old sayings, speaking and writing well, and disputes with copy editors.
877-929-9673.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
Or find us on Facebook.
Just look for A Way with Words.
