English Pangrams: A quick brown fox

This famous sentence - "A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" - is an example of a pangram containing all the letters of the English alphabet. According to Wikipedia, the sentence first appeared in The Michigan School Moderator in 1995. And check out these re-imaginings of the quick brown fox: Across Genres.

You can find more examples in this Wikipedia article about pangrams. It includes English pangrams, and there are pangrams in other languages too. Here are some of the English ones:

• The five boxing wizards jump quickly. 
• Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. 
• Watch "Jeopardy!", Alex Trebek's fun TV quiz game.
• Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes. 
• Foxy diva Jennifer Lopez wasn't baking my quiche. 
• Then a cop quizzed Mick Jagger's ex-wives briefly. 
• Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow!

I still think the one with the fox and the dog is best!

OOYL!

In Yoda style, it's not YOLO, but OOYL: Only Once You Live. Here is some more Yoda Language Humor, and scroll on down for some YOLO humor in the Indian Epics class.

This is a meme someone made in the Indian Epics class... in a world of (re)incarnations, no more YOLO. It's YOLMT.

Why We Need Creative Writing

Here's why:

Writing Humor: Claws and Clauses

I'm not a fan of Grammarly software, but they do share some great humor at their blog!

A Good Writing Day

Embrace the NOW when you are writing: that's all that matters! Here's a cartoon from Debbie Ridpath Ohi at inkygirl.com to inspire you, and check out her Four Stages of Writing also. :-)

The Lion Learns to Write

You may have seen this proverb making its way around the Internet: Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.

I'm not sure if it is actually an African proverb or not; its current popularity probably goes back to John Oliver Killens' Black Man's Burden (find out more about Killens at Wikipedia). You'll also see it attributed to H. Rap Brown.

There's a fable of Aesop that conveys the same message, but it is about sculpture rather than writing. Here is an ancient Greek version:

A man and a lion were arguing. The man proclaimed the superiority of the human race, while the lion argued on behalf of his own kind.  

As they were contending with one another as to who was superior, the man produced as evidence the statue of a lion being defeated by a man.  

The lion retorted, 'And if there were also sculptors among us lions, you would see more people being conquered by lions than lions by people!' 

In this medieval Latin version, the lion takes the man to see a true performance:

A man and a lion were arguing about who was best, with each one seeking evidence in support of his claim. 

They came to a tombstone on which a man was shown in the act of strangling a lion, and the man offered this picture as evidence. 

The lion then replied, 'It was a man who painted this; if a lion had painted it, you would instead see a lion strangling a man. But let's look at some real evidence instead.' 

The lion then brought the man to the amphitheatre and showed him so he could see with his own eyes just how a lion strangles a man. 

The lion then concluded, 'A pretty picture is not proof: facts are the only real evidence!' 

Here are some illustrations for the Aesop's fable.

Harrison Weir. The man here is none other than Hercules (famous for subduing the Nemean Lion as one of his labors).

Osius's Aesop (imitating Bernard Salomon's illutration). Here the lion simply attacks the man to prove his point!

Walter Crane: Here the lion snarls angrily at the statue.

I do not know the source for this image (you'll see it here and there online); it shows the man in modern military garb:

Without imagination, we go nowhere.

You can see more of Molly Hahn's beautiful "Buddha Doodles" at her website, and she also has a series of books (including a Kindle book) at Amazon.

The quote is from Carl Sagan: Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere. (from Cosmos, 1980)

Resource: Caps Lockness Monster

Beware the Nessie in your keyboard: the Caps Lockness Monster!

Grant Snider: All I Need to Write

I'm actually not that fussy... but I have to have a lot of light, and natural light is best for sure! To see the full-size view, see Grant Snider's blog: All I Need To Write. His work is also available in poster-size to put on your wall!

A room with a view ... No other work to do ... A childproof lock ... A ticking clock ... Natural light ... A chair that fits just right ... New paper and pens ... Some animal friends ... The right phase of the moon ... Ambient tunes ... A world of my creation ... Or internal motivation.

Is spellcheck working?

Raise your hand if you have done this! (I have.)

Happiness is being creative

Find out more at the Happiness Is page at Facebook.

Humor: You say potato, I say... GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEEAU

Via Grammarly at Facebook:

Game of Thrones: Character Arc Generator

Game of Thrones: it's a grim world! Memento mori. Here's a character arc generator from John Atkinson's blog.

Punctuation Personalities

The graphic by Carrie J Keplinger asks which punctuation mark matches your personality. I guess I am mostly a semi-colon, with a dash of dash! :-)

And here's another take on the same idea that I found at Twitter; click image for larger view: 

Writer's Block

I think you all know this feeling! Writer's block... visualized:

I write to find myself, share myself, and lose myself.

A beautiful graphic that Tynea Lewis shared at Twitter. The image of the dandelion is such a beautiful metaphor from nature and perfect for this time of year. And do you know the etymology of the word "dandelion"...? It is quite wonderful too:

Etymonline.com: Dandelion. early 15c., earlier dent-de-lioun (late 14c.), from Middle French dent de lion, literally "lion's tooth" (from its toothed leaves), translation of Medieval Latin dens leonis. 

I write to find myself, share myself, and lose myself.

69 Rules of Punctuation

What an amazing infographic! It's from Curtis Newbold, The Visual Communication Guy. Click on this image for a large view, or use the detail snippets below.

Detail snippets:

Stories Have to Be Told

Some words of wisdom from Sue Monk Kidd:

Stories have to be told or they die,

and when they die,

we can't remember who we are

or why we're here.

Sanskrit Word in English: Yoga

The Sanskrit word YOGA is now very familiar to speakers of English!  What is fascinating about the word "yoga" is that it is also a way to see how Sanskrit and English are related languages, both belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. The Sanskrit word "yoga" is from the Indo-European root *yeug- which is also the root of English words like "yoke" and also "join." If you are interested in the history of the Indo-European languages, you can read more at Wikipedia. You can see a detailed list of the Indo-European words from the yeug- root at the UT Indo-European Lexicon.

The idea behind the Sanskrit word is a "joining" or "yoking," in the sense of harnessing something in order to put it to use. It can also refer to the sense of "joining" with the divine.  You can read about the history of yoga and the different yoga traditions of India in this article at Wikipedia.

In Sanskrit, a man who practices yoga is called a "yogi" (yogin), while a woman who practices yoga is a "yogini." Sanskrit is a language that forms many compound words; you can see a list of Sanskrit compound words with yoga at Vedabase.net.

(Statue of Shiva in Rishikesh, India)

Word from Mythology: Tantalize

Today's word from mythology is tantalize, which means to torment someone with the sight of something desirable that is just out of reach. The word comes from Tantalus, the King of Phrygia, who was tortured in the afterlife by having to stand up in water that reaches to his chin, with tree branches full of fruit directly in front of him. Every time that he tried to drink, however, the water would recede so that he could not drink, and every time that he tried to reach out and pluck one of the fruits, the branch pulled away so he could not reach the fruit.

King Tantalus committed various crimes that could have led to his famous punishment. One of his most notorious crimes was to sacrifice his own son, Pelops, cooking him up and serving him at a banquet for the gods. The gods realized what was happening, but only after Demeter had already eaten Pelops's shoulder. Clotho, one of the Fates, brought Pelops back to life, but because one of his shoulders was missing, it had to be replaced with a shoulder of ivory.

The image below is a 16th-century illustration of a poem about Tantalus by Alciato:

And here is a Renaissance painting by Joseph Heintz the Elder: