Style Conversational: Stick your knobstick in the jerkinhead, okay?
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The Empress of The Style Invitational talks about this week’s contest and results
By Pat MyersSeptember 18, 2014
I know, Week 1090 is sooo immature. But the part of my epidermis that is showing is blushing only a wee bit in embarrassment. I’m somewhat surprised that we got to do this contest; I did take the step of asking for approval beforehand. But “words are words,” figures Arts & Style features editor David Malitz, even though these words are “fuksheet,” “invagination” and “pershittie.”

Your poem isn’t required to sound dirty to someone who doesn’t know what the word actually means (which would be virtually everyone); there are other ways to make poems funny. The only rule is that the word can’t only mean something it doesn’t really mean: When I read the poems, I’m going to keep the real meanings in mind. (By “real,” I mean what it says on this “50 Words That Sound Rude” list on Mental Floss.) Note that the Invitational’s list doesn’t include all 50 words; there are about 40. So many of the 50 redundantly contain “cock” or “dick” or “hole.” And I also omitted “kumbang,” which is a certain kind of wind in Indonesia.

I’ll probably run the poems with the definition at the bottom, as in this week’s example, which was written by a man who just this week released a picture book for little children.

Some real douzies: The 12-letter neologisms of Week 1086
Invite neologism contests always work. Okay, I shouldn’t be fallaciously inductive: Invite neologism contests always have worked. It’s amazing, really, that the well doesn’t run dry. Um, hasn’t run dry. But some of our contests present certain challenges. For Week 1086 it was the length of the term: a 12-letter word (or an 11- or 13- letter one) is often hard to read — I had to look at most of the entries pretty slowly — and its potential for humor decreases if readers aren’t going to get from one end of the word to the other. Two examples I noted during the judging: “hypotoniceity” and “feuhemeristic.” (Sometimes the revised word looked almost identical to the original; I had to look twice at “prostituition,” which is why I added a hyphen to Steve Langer’s entry.)


“Hypotoniceity” and “feuhemeristic” also point to some advice I gave four weeks ago, and apply to all the neologism contests: If the reader doesn’t immediately sense the original term you’re playing on, he’s probably not going to find it very interesting. Which means that the reader has to be familiar with that word. Some people’s entries included the original as well, to be helpful; I tried not to look at the explanation, however, since the eventual reader wouldn’t see it. But it did come in handy when the writer of “Afroembolism: Cause a blood clot by wearing cornrows that are too tight” explained that he/she (I never looked) was playing on “aeroembolism.” Ah. (I still don’t know what “hypotoniceity” and “feuhemeristic” are referring to.)

And that entry points to another problem I see all the time in neologism contests: The definition doesn’t match the part of speech of the neologism. Even though the neologism is a made-up word, our familiarity with the English language lets us see the word as a noun or verb or adjective or whatever. We know that “Afroembolism” isn’t a verb, it’s a noun; it has the noun suffix -ism and is based on the noun embolism — and so why would the definition be the definition of a verb? The definition for that one needed to begin with “A blood clot caused by . . .” Then there was “Flopcharting: Career statistician for the Chicago Cubs.” The definition needed to see the word as a verb (“keeping stats for the Cubs”) or as a gerund, a noun in verb form that involves doing something (“data analysis for the Cubs”). “Flopcharting,” whatever it is, is not a person.

I’m glad that I allowed multi-word terms in both the original and the neologism; it turned out that three of the funniest entries this week comprised two or more words. I didn’t, however, accept extra words just to pad the entry to 12 letters: “A wicked witch,” “a crystallizer,” etc. I was fairly lenient toward plurals and other suffixes that brought the total to 12, though sometimes they were a bit too distracting: “volumptuously” and especially “badvertisings,” for example, because we don’t tend to use the words “voluptuously” and “advertisings.”

ADVERTISING

Finally, as always, I got lots of great neologisms that deserved funnier definitions than the ones they came with. When I judge word contests on printouts, I mark entries “BD” — should have a better definition — and often compile them into a list. A couple of times I’ve sent them out in a later contest to be crowdsourced by the Loser Community; I’m not sure whether I’ll do that for these words, which include “My Little Phony,” “RBI-wan Kenobi,” “rubscription,” “gymphomaniac” and “unsung zeroes.”

No such problems for the 40-odd inking entries this week — every one of them, alas, written by a repeat offender to the Invitational. It’s the second Inkin’ Memorial, and the 59th ink in all, for Larry Gray since his debut in Week 923. Larry’s first win was in Week 1045, last year, when we asked to turn a line from a song into a statement, and add a question it could answer: From “Ain’t No Sunshine”: A. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know . . . Q. Didn’t I say you couldn’t stop a moving helicopter rotor by yourself?

I’m not surprised that Nan Reiner, who’s carved a niche for herself in Loserdom with jokes about local politics, noticed that her recently convicted ex-governor, Bob McDonnell, conveniently has a 12-letter name. Or that she took it to the next level with both his new name (“SOB McDonnell” is so obvious — once you’ve seen Nan come up with it). Nan recently hit the 200-ink mark and now marches forward with two more, including her 21st ink above the fold.


Melissa Balmain, who’ll be coming to D.C. in December with her new, utterly delightful book of poems, “Walking In on People,” had a great Invite week; her runner-up “Cream of What” topped three honorable mentions, for 53 inks in all.

And Brendan Beary (see 339 previous contests).

Obviously seeking the Nerd of the Week prize was Elden Carnahan, whose entry wouldn’t have been printable anyway if we’d actually been able to read it:
FUCOXANTHINS [acetic acid [(1S,3R)-3-hydroxy-4-[(3E,5E,7E,9E,11E,13E,15E)-18-[(1S,4S,6R)-4-hydroxy-2,2,6-trimethyl-7-oxabicyclo[4.1.0]heptan-1-yl]-3,7,12,16-tetramethyl-17-oxooctadeca-1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15-octaenylidene]-3,5,5-trimethylcyclohexyl] ester] --> FUCOXANTHIS!: what the ill-prepared student of organic chemistry might say the night before the final exam.

Maybe Elden would like to write a poem about it.

(See the bottom of this column for some unprintable entries.)

You can’t keep that brunch down — yet another new location for this Sunday
This month’s Loser brunch — originally planned for Baltimore, then for Potomac — will now be at Clyde’s overlooking the lake in Columbia, Md., between the Washington and Baltimore beltways, this Sunday at noon. I won’t be able to make it, but I hear that a number of northwest-of-D.C. Losers and Style Invitational Devotees plan to gather there, and probably won’t even throw their food. If you’d like to join in, RSVP to Elden Carnahan on his Loser website so he can give the restaurant a head count. I do plan to make it to next month’s brunch, Oct. 19, at the Front Page in Arlington’s Ballston district.

See you next week — maybe
Next Thursday’s Conversational might be especially late, especially early, or nonexistent: Rosh Hashanah begins Wednesday night and continues on Thursday, and the Empress is going to be doing the New Year thing, which isn’t exactly a party but does have some cool noisemakers. Regardless, next week’s Invitational should appear as usual, sometime late Thursday afternoon.

The dozen doesn’t: Unprintables from Week 1086
(Note: Crude wordplay below. Please don’t read it if you think it will bother you.)

Motherpucker: Oedipus-lite. (Bruce Carlson)
Skulldungery: Shitheadedness. (Christopher Lamora)
Clithographic: What Georgia O’Keeffe’s art is. (Mark Richardson)
Eat-her proof (as in weatherproof): Property of a chastity belt. (Sylvia Betts)
Procotologism: KY Jelly; and Lickety-spilt: Badly performed oral stimulation. (Roy Ashley)

Yes, you clearly are immature enough to get to work on Week 1090.