English pangrams with ducks [closed]

Question

There have already been several examples of trivialities, here, apropos ducks, and I think that this one is not much worse than others…

Motivation

This evening I saw an ad on this site from The LaTeX Font Catalogue: it was screaming something like (I don’t remember exactly) “We feature quick foxes… Sleazy dogs…”, and, all of a sudden, it hit me that no mention at all was made of ducks! I’m becoming so biased in this regard that I felt immediately compelled to invent a pangram involving ducks, to be used for displaying the full set of lowercase letters in a font. Unfortunately, my limited English vocabulary didn’t permit me to go any further than

The jumping yellow duck quacks from the overfull horizontal box.

(actually, I didn’t try that hard!), which is 54 character long, so I thought of seeking help from my friendly fellows at TeX.SX!

Question and Rules

The question is to find a short English sentence that:

• makes sense;

• contains all the 26 English lowercase letters (the first letter of the sentence must be uppercase, so it does not count, nor does any other letter in the sentence that must be capitalized according to the rules of the English grammar);

• makes explicit mention of ducks, not necessarily as the subject of the sentence; note, however, that the word “duck” must refer to the bird (so, for instance, using the verb “to duck” doesn’t suffice, in itself, to comply with this rule);

• contains at least an implicit, but clearly recognizable, reference to (La)TeX (e.g., the “overfull horizontal box”, in our example).

The shortest sentence wins.

Clarification about the rules

After seeing a few answers, I think there are a couple of points that should be clarified:

1. Using explicitly the words “TeX” or “LaTeX” as references to the (La)TeX world breaks what is perhaps the most important rule about word puzzles: in a riddle on the checkerboard, you cannot use the word “checkerboard”; but in any case, we all agree upon the rule that those words—when referring to (La)TeX—must be capitalized in the “usual unusual” way, so they would only make you gain a couple of vowels. Of course, you can still mention Tex Willer… ;-)

2. One could argue that mentioning ducks is, in itself, a reference to TeX: well, no, your answer must contain a reference independent of ducks (and also of marmots)!

Comment

On second thought, perhaps this is the most stupid question ever asked here, even restricting to those concerning ducks!

Answer 1

Here's one with 36 letters:

A jovial duck with zany plumage foxes breqn.

This is like code golf but for words. Here's one with 34 letters:

A jive duck with zany plumage foxes breqn.

This is now the same length as one shorter than the classic one.

Answer 2

I have found a shorter sentence myself:

Ducks wearing pyjamas squeezed into an overfull hbox.

It contains 44 lowercase letters. By comparison, the usual

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

has 34 lowercase letters.

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Edit: One letter shorter:

Eight ducks with pyjamas squeezed in an overfull box.

Also, removed jargon (“hbox”)‚

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2nd Edit: 40 lowercase letters:

Eighty-two ducks jump squeezed in an overfull box.

This is something one could try to illustrate with the help of the tikzduck package…

Answer 3

REVISION: A bit longer but with a marmot (and reference to latex):

Marmot vows to help best friend quacking tikz duck enjoy latex.

And for those with access to Mathematica: here is a short script that might help prevent you from getting mad.

mystring = 
  "Marmot vows to help best friend quacking tikz duck enjoy latex.";
Complement[CharacterRange["a", "z"], 
 Union[StringPartition[mystring, 1]]]

Answer 4

Not sure it is perfectly grammatical (or if it makes much sense), but here is a attempt with 40 letters and no jargon:

eight squab latex ducks improve frozen jetways