Question: As I understand it, the word "romance" comes from "Roman." So how did it obtain an association with love?Answer: In the last centuries of the Roman Empire,the wide variety and the geographical distribution of the peoples recognized as Roman citizens led inevitably to the gradual change of the classical language of earlier days that we call Latin. These developing languages, which in their early, unrecorded stages were only local dialects of Latin, were designated "romans" (to use the Old French term cognate with other similar forms in Spanish, Italian the other languages that we still call "romance" languages today) to distinguish from the formal and official language.
Most serious literature, both prose and verse, continued to be written in Latin, but the practice gradually arose in France of writing entertaining verse tales in the more popular spoken language. Thus, to refer to something written in "romans" was to refer to one of these works, and in Old French the word "romans" came to mean "a tale in verse based chiefly on legend, chivalric love and adventure or the supernatural." In this sense the word was borrowed into Middle English. Because many of these tales in both English and French, as well as in other languages, dealt with chivalric or courtly love, "romance" came to mean simply "a love story" and eventually it developed the sense of "a love affair."
Question: What is a pangram?
Answer: A pangram is a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet. The "ideal" pangram contains exactly 26 letters without resorting to the use of proper names or abbreviations. The most familiar pangram is that old typing exercise sentence, "A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." For keyboarding practice, there's not much to improve on there, as the extra seven letters don't really matter. (It's not likely to be replaced in high school typing manuals by "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs," with 32 letters.) What it lacks in brevity it makes up for in reasonableness, something slightly lacking in "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz," "The five boxing wizards jump quickly" (both with 31 letters), and "How quickly daft jumping zebras vex" (30 letters).
In fact, the closer a pangram approaches the "ideal" state the more it must suffer from unintelligibility. Take "Brick quiz whangs jumpy veldt fox" (28 letters), and "Veldt jynx grimps waqf zho buck" (26 letters, featured in the 1988 Guinness Book of World Records as a "perfect" example). These sentences obviously require some explanation, so we'll help you out. A "brick" is a good-hearted person, a "quiz" is an eccentric person, "whang" means "to beat," and "veldt" is a southern African grassland, so the first sentence means something like "A good-hearted eccentric person beats a jumpy fox on an African grassland."
In the second sentence, a "jynx" is a woodpecker, "grimp" means "to climb," "waqf" is an Islamic endowment of property used for religious or charitable purposes, and a "zho" is a cross between a yak and a domestic cow, so we can translate as something like "A woodpecker on an African grassland climbs a male cross between a yak and a cow on property endowed for religious purposes."
The achievement of the ideal apparently requires a willingness "to delve into the esoteric hinterland of our language," as one pangrammatist put it. This same word fiend proffered "Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz," using only words that can be found in a good desk dictionary. A "cwm" (pronounced "coom") is a steep-walled mountain basin, a "glyph" is a symbolic figure carved in relief, and "vext" is a variant past tense of "vex."
The quest for the perfect pangram has "vext" would-be pangrammatists probably since classical times (the ancient Romans had to deal with only 22 letters, and, lucky for them, no "z" and "j"). It isn't known who invented the word and exactly when it was first used, but our first print record is from 1964, with the adjective "pangrammatic" attested somewhat earlier, in 1933. "Pangram" is derived from Greek "pan," meaning "all," and "gramma," which means "letter."