When Eric Harshbarger discovered a year ago that Sony Pictures was planning a movie remake of the TV series The Equalizer he was beyond excited.
This was not because he was a fan of the original series, or even a devotee of Denzel Washington, in the lead role, but because of an incredibly rare alphabetical property of the title.
The Equalizer has both a ‘Q’ and a ‘Z’ in it!
“The letter Q is notoriously infrequent when it comes to film titles,” said Eric. “Sure, we all know it’s not a very common letter in the English language, but its rarity in movie names is ridiculous.”
The appearance of a film with a Q and a Z raised the possibility that Eric would live to see an epochal event – the first time that the top 10 films at the US weekend box office would include all 26 letters of the alphabet. (Since 1982, at least, when figures are readily available on the internet).
Earlier this year, when Eric – a wordplay enthusiast from Alabama who is also a professional Lego sculptor – discovered that The Boxtrolls was scheduled for release on the same September weekend as The Equalizer, his anticipation reached fever pitch.
Now two films with the three least common letters – X, Q and a Z – were guaranteed to appear together.
He was crippled by excitement. “It’s no exaggeration to say that nearly every day of that duration I kept abreast of any movie title or release date changes that were announced about this weekend. Even though I had absolutely no control over what movies might eventually land on or around that date, the Q-X-Z combination had certainly gotten my hopes up.”
And sure enough, on the weekend of September 26-28, it came to pass.
- The Equalizer
- The Maze Runner
- The Boxtrolls
- This Is Where I Leave You
- Dolphin Tale 2
- No Good Deed
- A Walk Among the Tombstones
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- Let’s Be Cops
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
He said: “The J was present only because Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did not slip out of the top ten. The C appears only in Let’s Be Cops. Never would I have imagined that I’d be so thankful that Let’s Be Cops and Ninja Turtles had stayed in the theatres for so long.
“And it’s a good thing too. Because that J is definitely disappearing from the top 10 next week, and by the time The Judge appears on 10 October, we’ll be in the midst of a P-drought (no major release has a P in its title until Before I Go To Sleep on 31 October).”
The name for a piece of text that includes every letter in the alphabet is a “pangram”. Previously, the shortest pangram from the weekend box office list required 13 movies (this happened once in 1987 and twice in 2013).
You may be wondering what any of this has got to do with mathematics, since that is supposedly the subject of this blog. Well, I take a very open view of what constitutes maths. Anything that is about searching for patterns is fine with me.
And pangrams are really fun.
The most famous pangram is the phrase “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, which was supposedly used to test typewriters a century ago and is now used to demonstrate fonts.
However, “The quick brown fox … ” uses 35 letters – nine more than is necessary.
Many attempts have been made to make a 26-letter pangram but they all stretch the bounds of meaning and readability, like: “The glib czar junks my VW Fox PDQ.”
Eric has made his own 27 letter pangram, which I think is brilliant. It describes Scrabble players of restricted growth:
“Q, Z, both vex lucky jumping dwarfs.”
He also just made a new one:
“Well, Moviegoers, Quite A Krazy Box Office Just Happened!”
It certainly did.
Eric’s blog LOGOLOG contains lots of fun wordplay stuff. Here’s his post where he reveals the movie pangram.
