Style Conversational Week 1108: We welcome your heartfeld sediments; The Style Invitational Empress discusses this week's contest and results Washington Post Blogs January 22, 2015 Thursday 6:55 PM EST Copyright 2015 The Washington Post All Rights Reserved Length: 1382 words Byline: Pat Myers Body I tend to have two reactions to most contest suggestions I get these days: 1. "Sorry, we've done that." 2. "Oh, we've done that -yeah, that was a good one. Let's do it again." I can't state a strict criterion about when I make Reply No. 1 vs. Reply No. 2. But for Week 1108 of The Style Invitational -which repeats a contest we've done in various forms three times -I'll point to a combination of factors: First, I'm not paying attention to Week 47, which asked for "bad Valentine's Day poetry" -I would like funny-clever, not funny-because-it's-lame. (The results here -scroll down past that week's new contest -show that the latter gets old pretty fast.) The second and third contests, on the other hand, produced some great results. But they're from 2004 and 2006. And so I figure that there are lots of new people to mock with flowery sentiments. (Hey, a skunk cabbage has a flower, too.) Some winners from Weeks 544 and 645. Complete results are here and here. To the National Zoo's then-baby resident: As you chew on the bamboo and yawnIn the sun on your makeshift veranda,Here's my Valentine wish, dear Tai Shan:May you never be moo goo gai panda. (Chris Doyle, the winner of Week 645) Slinkity, binkity,Eva Longoria,Oh, how I pine as youPlay hard to get.Why does my ardor meetNon-reciprocity?I guess you aren't that"Desperate" yet. (Brendan Beary, runner-up the same week) As was this one, which I think worked better because at the time we didn't have to give his last name: To my favorite lobbyist: Remember that cash in the sack? I regret that I must give it back.If they ask about meWhile you're copping your plea,Be nice: Tell 'em I don't know Jack. (Nick Curtis) And among the valentines to generic people: To a veterinarian: From three little stray cats, each with a uterus:Happy Valentine's Day --please will you neuter us? (Sue Lin Chong) From one historical/literary figure to another: A Valentine, some hugs and pecks,A night of wild, illicit sex.As your pastor, I must say,Miss Prynne, you've earned yourself an A. (Chris Doyle, who, you might have noticed, has made himself pretty useful over the past 15 years). From Calvin Coolidge to his wife, Grace: Yrs. (Tom Kreitzberg) I'm very optimistic about this contest. For the option of actually composing a graphic card: It has to look really good as well as be really clever, and if it's going into the print paper, it has to be readable in black-and-white. I won't be looking at graphic entries blindly, and I might get back to you if there's something I'd like you to tweak. Don't put your own name into the graphic. And The Post will not publish it if the photo you use is copyrighted. Any photos on Wikipedia are for general use, and many Getty's stock photos are free if you use the proper credit, which we're happy to do. (See here for details.) Please send your graphic as an attachment, at least 500K resolution and preferably higher. I know that some of you out there are Photoshop whizzes - here's your chance. Can you believe that two people, one in Texas and one in California, noted that HPD stands for both histrionic personality disorder and highest posterior density -and then related them to the perfect-for-both Kim Kardashian? That's what Chris Doyle and Frank Osen did this week in this week's abbreviation contest. Larry Gray scored the rare Invite feat of snaring two wins in two weeks -for three in all since he debuted in Week 923. (I had told him, in this week's prize letter, to save a little room on the mantelpiece.) Frank Mann gets the perhaps dubious "fossilized dinosaur poop" from the otherwise reputable SkullsUnlimited.com; Chris Doyle yadda yadda; and Kristen Rahman picks up her third "above the fold" ink out -plus two honorable mentions -to boost her blot total by 30 percent in a week. There's lots of grousing discussion on the Style Invitational Devotees page on Facebook about the list of members of Congress we're using for this year's still-running "joint legislation" contest, Week 1107 -97 comments as I write this. First of all, it was noted that it was missing the names of legislators who took office before the 2014 election but after the previous freshman class -most notably David Brat, who replaced Eric Cantor late last year in a ploy to give him seniority over this year's frosh. Yup, the list I worked from didn't have those people, and I just forgot about the gun-jumpers who'd won special elections. But as Loser Jeff Shirley noted: "Missing a Brat -not the wurst that could happen." No doubt lots of people would have sent entries playing off "Brat." But I would have run at the most two of them. Also, there's a lot of concern about the pronunciation of the legislators' names; while I'd included "pronouncers" for many of them, I didn't note, for example, that Blum isn't pronounced "bloom" as it is in Germany, or that Dianne Feinstein, who has been a prominent senator for 22 years, isn't "Fine-steen." Also, I hadn't explained that Moolenaar is "Mole-enar" rather than "Mool-enar." And then was the complaint that if you did use the right pronunciation of , say, Gallegos (guy-AY-gos rather than gal-LEG-os or GALL-e-gos), readers wouldn't understand the joke because they don't know how to pronounce Gallegos. These people have a point: A wordplay joke is more reliable when the pronunciation is less ambiguous -this is why some of the best song parodies and limericks make it very clear from the words used where their accents fall; that way people won't read them another way in their heads and "miss the joke." Still: There are about a hundred names on that list, and you get to try 25 combinations. So maybe you'd want to include some totally unambiguous pronunciations along with ones that require a little knowledge. Also: A lot of people do know how to pronounce Gallegos. And there is some give in how much you can stretch a pronunciation so that it sounds like another word. While you can't pretend that Gallego has something to do with plastic building blocks made for girls, or that Mooney sounds like Money, there's just a shade of sound difference between Moolenaar and Molenaar; either interpretation will probably work in a joke. In any case, this contest remains one of the most popular perennials we do -entries are flooding in, with many by new entrants. For the 2013 joint-legislation contest, I counted an in-cred-ible 105 new e-mail addresses that week; normally I might get 10. This time there might not be so many -for one thing, a lot of those 105 people came back since, and some just do this one contest -but it's clear that this remains a popular contest, especially in Washington, where legislators' names can be part of the local news. My apologies about the continuing problem with the auto-reply that you're supposed to get after sending your entries to losers@washpost.com I have talked to several people in The Post's IT department about this -and thanks, techie Losers, for your suggestions -and they've been trying to work around the usual set-up in which the auto-reply doesn't want to tell you more than once that Mr. Dropbox is on vacation (or in our case, that we've received your entry and here's the stuff you forgot to look at in the rules the first time around). William of IT has created a program that's working on his computer in which he updates it once a day; this is why many of you have begun to get the auto-reply again, but not for a second e-mail you sent the same day. When I go to The Post's newsroom next Tuesday, I'm bringing my personal laptop, and he'll load that program for me too. So my fingers are crossed that after next Tuesday, I'll no longer be answering e-mails all day long about whether someone's entry has reached me. (The other problem is that I currently can't see both my regular Post e-mail box and the Losers e­mail on my phone, so I can't check on entries until I get home.) And yes, it's been noted that the owner of this company might find all this mess a bit surprising. All I can say is that they know what my problem is, courtesy of my big and increasingly caustic mouth.