Numerous readers have picked a nit with the nit I picked with Chris Buckley’s “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cow” in my June diary. Not only should “cow” be “dog,” they observed, but “jumped” should be “jumps,” for the “s” (and then you need “dog” even more, for the “d”).

This is right, of course. That Cape Cod air must have addled my brain; or perhaps it was the chowder. For penance I shall now transcribe, with no typographical guarantees at all, the entire entry for 23 February from the late Willard R. Espy’s 1975 classic Almanac of Words at Play, which I take to be the last word on these matters.

23 FEBRUARY
Squdgy Fez, Blank Jimp Crwth Vox
The quality of existing pangrams is unsatisfactory. Augustus Morgan’s nineteenth-century “I, quartz pyx, who fling muck beds,” ignored v and j, recent arrivals on the alphabetical scene. “Cwm fjord-banks glyphs vext quiz” makes room for the v and j, but is not likely to become a common remark even among geologists. Claude E. Shannon wrote, “Squdgy Fez, Blank Jimp Crwth Vox,” which has something to do with wearing a squashed Turkish hat and muting a Welsh violin.
If you are willing to fudge by repeating a few letters, the problem of including all twenty-six letters in a single passage becomes more manageable. For instance:
”The five boxing wizards jump quickly.” (31)
”Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.” (32)
”Jim just quit and packed extra heavy bags for Liz Owen.” (44)
If you wish to use each letter twice, your goal is a sentence of fifty-two letters. The nearest to this I have run into is Mary Youngquist’s “Sylvan plight: five jinxed wizards jump, weigh quartz, mock quick baby fox.” (60)
Darryl Francis found in Webster’s New International Dictionary, second edition, three words totaling thirty-nine letters and including all the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. The words are quick-flowing, semibolshevized, and juxtapyloric. The following verse is a lipogram, since it lacks the letter e, and also a pangram, since it contains all the other letters of the alphabet:
Quixotic boys who look for joys
Quixotic hazards run.
A lass annoys with trivial toys
Opposing man for fun.
— Author unknown

[Me] Not quite the last word, perhaps. The utterance “Jump, dogs! Why vex Fritz Blank, Q.C.?” is a perfect pangram, containing each letter of the alphabet precisely once. It makes a great deal more sense than any other perfect pangram I’ve seen. It also manages to include four different punctuation marks. Unfortunately (a) it’s two sentences, not one, (b) it only makes sense in the U.K., where “Q.C.” stands for “Queens Counsel,” a barrister, (c) it includes that abbreviation, which disallows it, and (d) it includes a made-up proper name — though a very plausible one: Lenin’s mother was originally a Blank.

And there’s a nit to be picked with Espy, too: It was Augustus De Morgan.