There follows a sentence that contains all the letters of the English alphabet. Typing it out is a good way to reinforce ones typing skills. It also removes dust from the keys of those letters that one rarely uses, like z and x and epsilon. Here goes:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Not only does that sentence serve a useful function or two, but it conjures up vivid images of wildlife interacting with domesticated animals. Or in this case, one wildlife and one domesticated animal. From what I've read on the matter, this sentence was inspired by a true story. However, what inspired this short sentence was quite a bit different than what we are lead to believe.
What actually happened is that the author, a little-known and underappreciated essayist and part-time scuba instructor named Walter Wolf, saw something happen in his back yard, or garden, in the spring of 1902 as he was struggling to come up with a sentence containing all the letters of the alphabet. His editor had commanded him to do so as part of an upcoming special edition of the magazine he was writing for at that time, the Saturday Evening Pillar.
Poor Wolf found the task to be nothing short of herculean, and worked on it day and night for most of a week. He wrote, and discarded, dozens of sentences during that time. Nothing seemed to work. Most of his results ended up being far too long, with one sentence containing over 300 words, including sixteen separate clauses. He needed something short and punchy. He also had to make it logical and true to life.
His inspiration came the afternoon before his deadline. Wolf had gotten up from his rolltop desk after writing a rather forced scene involving a frozen mosquito getting his just desserts. Looking out his back window he saw something that ended up, albeit in a roundabout way, permanently changing the way we test our keyboard prowess. Outside his window was his pet dog, lying in the sun. However, this dog was unlike the dog of the famous sentence. This dog was not lazy. In fact, he had been working all morning plowing the field and collecting wood and had only just laid down out of sheer exhaustion. He was just taking a ten minute break before going to the local drug store to fetch some supplies. And then suddenly, off to the right, Wolf saw something coming toward his back yard from the woods. It was a fox indeed. But the color of this fox was reddish more than brown. And, as Wolf later admitted under oath, it was not actually quick. As a matter of fact, this fox was very slow. And having a deformed rear left leg, it more or less limped into the yard. Also the fox never came anywhere near the exhausted dog, despite what we have always been told by the Elites. In reality, the poor fox creeped slowly into the edge of the yard, turned around, and went back into the woods.
But that scenario as it played out in real life was remarkable enough to make an impression on our Mr. Wolf. He stood staring a full ten minutes or so out the window, thinking about what he had just witnessed. He stood there long enough to see his dog get up from his short nap and head out to the drug store. In his creative brain there swirled all sorts of letters and words and canids and adjectives. And then it hit him like a thunderbolt. He rushed back to his desk, put a fresh piece of paper in his typewriter, and in one single attempt wrote the famous sentence we have all come to admire. Deadline met. History made.
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