Literary Pangrams

This excerpt from Coriolanus contains every letter of the alphabet but Z:

O, a kiss
Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!
Now, by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss
I carried from thee, dear; and my true lip
Hath virgin’d it e’er since.

This one, from Milton’s Paradise Lost (from the Z in grazed to the b in Both), contains all of them:

Likening his Maker to the grazed ox,
Jehovah, who, in one night, when he passed
From Egypt marching, equalled with one stroke
Both her first-born and all her bleating gods.

See Quick Brown Fox, A Biblical Pangram, A Pangrammatic Highway, and Nevermore.

| Language · Literature

All Greek

To a dining companion, William Hogarth once sent a card inscribed with a knife, a fork, and these letters:

Η Β Π

It was an invitation to “eta beta pi.”

Exasperated that Nicholas Rowe kept borrowing his snuffbox, Samuel Garth wrote these letters on the lid:

Φ Ρ

“Fie! Rowe!”

Their friend John Dennis observed, “A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.”

| Language

Spoon River

“Lines by an Oxford Don,” from the Globe, June 1805:

My brain was filled with rests of thought,
No more by currying wares distraught,
As lazing dreamily I lay
In my Canoodian canay.

Ah me, methought, how leef were swite
If men could neither wreak nor spite;
No erring bloomers, no more slang,
No tungles then to trip the tang!

No more the undergraddering tits
Would exercise their woolish fits
With tidal ales (and false, I wis)
Of my fame-farred tamethesis!

A sentence that makes equal sense when spoonerized: “I must brush my hat, for it is pouring with rain.”

When George S. Kaufman’s daughter told him a friend had eloped from Vassar, he said, “Ah! She put her heart before the course.”

| Language · Poems

Tidy

DEAD-ENDEDNESSES contains one A, two Ns, three Ss, four Ds, and five Es.

TEMPERAMENTALLY can be separated into a single letter followed by words of 2, 3, 4, and 5 letters: T, EM, PER, AMEN, TALLY.

| Language

A Three-Toed Tree Toad’s Ode

http://www.flickr.com/photos/93965446@N00/5938467
Image: Flickr

A he-toad loved a she-toad
That lived high in a tree.
She was a two-toed tree toad
But a three-toed toad was he.

The three-toed tree toad tried to win
The she-toad’s nuptial nod,
For the three-toed tree toad loved the road
The two-toed tree toad trod.

Hard as the three-toed tree toad tried,
He could not reach her limb.
From her tree-toad bower, with her V-toe power
The she-toad vetoed him.

— Anonymous

| Language · Poems

Calendar Trouble

In Macedonian, Listopad means October.
In Polish and Slovenian, Listopad means November.

In Czech, Srpen means August.
In Croatian, Srpanj means July.

In Croatian, Rujan means September.
In Czech, Říjen means October.

In Polish, Lipiec means July.
In Croatian, Lipanj means June.

In Polish, Kwiecień means April.
In Czech, Květen means May.

| Language