venta

Leaving Reading station this morning, I spotted a young chap carrying a black canvas shoulder bag. On it, in a nice, clear typeface, was written:

Wrongful practising of xylophone music tortures every larger dwarf.

Well. As political statements go, it's a bit unusual.

Something about the unhandy construction of the sentence made me guess that it was one of those which contains every letter of the alphabet. The words had that shoe-horned quality that suggested someone was trying to stick to some arbitrary rules when writing. Except... no z. No b, either, though it took me longer to spot that. In fact... no, it's just rubbish.

Curiosity piqued, I googled for the phrase once I'd got to work. From the google summary page, I deduced it was a known pangram.

A what? Wikipedia. Oh. That'll be "a sentence using every letter of the alphabet at least once".

But it isn't!

Further googling. Aha! That's a translation. The original is:

Falsches Üben von Xylophonmusik quält jeden größeren Zwerg.

So there you go. Pangrams: obvious even in translation.