Are you averse to acronyms? It would greatly shorten the text, and not all of them are overly contrived.
Borrowing from both The Perfect Master and from Shalmanese:
cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
???
CWM, FJORD-BANK GLYPHS VEXT QUIZ!
I’ve never understood this line–why was it so often used for typewriter demonstrations?
“The quick brown fox,etc…” is logical, since it uses the whole alphabet. But “now is the time…” is just dumb.Where did it come from, and why was it so common?
Amazingly, few discotheques provide juke boxes.
Bartleby chimes in again:
A check of the mechanics of the phrase tells me that only in the words “now” and “party” is that you have to use letters that are next to each other or that need to be typed with the same hand.
This works better by taking into account that the mechanical keys that actually pressed the ink on the paper were arranged like : 1qa2zws3xed4crf5v - etc. Speaking in the old mechanical sense, no 2 consecutive letters were next to each other!
The more letters that are next to each other mechanically in a phrase, the more likely early typewriters could jam. This was a phrase that was found to work to test speed and to help beginners of the mechanical keyboard era.
As much as I respect Cecil, I think something is not right: Weller did not claim credit for the line in his book that first reported the Phrase.
Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.
Thought you’d want to know.