Style Conversational Week 1120: We’re not pulling your chain — get ready to Flush
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The Flushies, the Losers’ award lunch & infestival: May 30 in Northern Va.

The Empress and family pal around with Week 1120 second prize Barack Obama at their Passover seder. The handsome yet rather shallow president will make an encore appearance at the Flushies before being sent off to his new home. (By Scott Malcolm )
By Pat MyersApril 16, 2015
A number of people have asked me this past week about the plans for this year’s Flushies, which makes me realize that I buried the news too far down the page in previous columns. Not all the details have been hammered out, twisted out of shape, etc., but within the next couple of weeks, if you’re on the Style Invitational e-mail list, you’ll be getting an invitation to the 20th annual shebang, which this year — in a Flushies first — will be held a safe distance from public facilities: It will be at the home of 2014 Loser of the Year Danielle Nowlin and her understanding husband and tykes, on Saturday afternoon, May 30, in the D.C. suburb of Fairfax Station, Va.

In recent years we’ve usually gathered in a meeting room of a suburban hotel, shoveling out close to $40 per person for suburban-hotel food and ambience, as we gathered to “honor” the Loser of the Year and other beleaguered souls. But this time, Danielle has offered her spacious, musically equipped house “as long as I don’t have to cook.” And if we do it as a potluck, with each of us showing up with a modest amount of food or drink, this year’s entrance fee will be close to (or at) zero. And you even have a good chance to be stuck with one or another of the door prizes.

Flushies Pooh-Bahs Elden Carnahan, Dave Prevar and Pie Snelson are still figuring out what they need to buy or rent, but once things are pretty much set, I’ll send the invitation with RSVP directions.


Given that it’s the 20th Flushies — named for the talking toilets (something like this) that used to be given out as awards — I’m hoping that we’ll reconnect with some Invite old-timers as well as meet the newer names. We already know that some far-flung Losers are coming in for the event: Frank Osen from California and Beverley Sharp from Alabama. And I’ve heard from two other faraways as well who are going to try to make it. Songs for the occasion are already being composed — and even though both Nowlins are professional musicians, they’re still going to let us sing them.

Meanwhile, THIS VERY SUNDAY ...

is a Loser brunch at noon at the sports pub Grevey’s, just outside the Beltway at the Route 50 exit near Falls Church, Va. Both the Royal Consort and I will be there. Not too many people have signed up so far, so I hope you’ll tell Elden Carnahan at bit.ly/invitebrunch that you’re coming.

Re-airing our Differences: This week’s contest, Week 1120
Out of some inexplicable compulsion, or some weird sense of obligation — all I know is that I’m eternally grateful for it — Loser Since Year 1 Elden Carnahan maintains, for zero compensation, the Web site nrars.org. The URL stands for Not Ready for the Algonquin Round-table Society, the amorphous community that is now better known as the Losers. Along with the statistics tracking the some 5,000 people who’ve gotten ink in The Style Invitational since Week 1, Elden also maintains the literally marvelous Master Contest List, which contains a link to every last Invite contest, often in multiple formats. And because it’s Elden’s site, not The Post’s, views of the contests don’t count toward The Post’s “paywall” limit of articles you can read without a subscription.

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I am probably the Master Contest List’s most avid reader, since I’m constantly checking whether we’ve used some idea or another in one of our previous 1,119 contests, and what the results were like. And Elden has also created more than 40 sub-lists for various contest categories: Cartoons, Horses, Poetry, Anagrams, etc.

Sure enough, there’s a category called Differences — and so it was easy for me to click my way down the list to select the single item from each contest to use in Week 1120. Valuable as it is, though, the Differences list gives links to the weeks those contests were announced, not to the results. For that, you need to go back to the Master List, find the contest, and then look three or four weeks down. But in my Empressarial beneficence, I have done that for you, as a special prize for bothering to read this.

If you’re entering this week’s contest, you do want to look at the old results, because even though these elements have been combined for the first time, there’s still a chance you can repeat a winning joke, something we’d like you not to do. There are just a few answers in each contest that feature any of this week’s elements, so you don’t have to read all the results (though of course they’re funny).
(On each link, scroll past the new contest to the results of the Differences contest.)


1. Results of Week 155 ($4 haircut)

2. Results of Week 169 (Dilbert’s necktie)

3. Results of Week 199 (Ruth Bader Ginsburg)

4. Results of Week 276 (that not-so-fresh feeling)

5. Results of Week 402 (pizza-scented shampoo)

6. Results of Week 466 (offensive line)

7. Results of Week 563 (old socks)

8. Results of Week 628 (400-meter dash)

9, Results of Week 697 (Loser magnet)

10. Results of Week 738 (“American Gothic”)

11. Results of Week 754 (Gandhi)

12. Results of Week 821 (elderly Labrador)

13. Results of Week 883 (Elizabethan sonnet)

14. Results of Week 934 (Biden tattoo)

15. Results of Week 972 (Yemen)

16. Results of Week 1022 (overactive bladder)

17. Results of Week 1063 (three-cupped bra)

I’m only a little bit worried that this revisiting contest won’t work. But hey, I can always fill the page with extra song parodies from Week 1117, which I’m judging now.

Giggle Maps:* The results of Week 1116
(*Another good title from Tom Witte, who also submitted the one I used in the column,“Inking Globally.”)

As usual when I run a neologism contest — in which the winning coinages are almost always plays on existing words — I said the entries in Week 1116 didn’t have to relate to the place whose name supplied the letters, but “entries are more likely to get ink if the definitions relate in some way to the place name.” This turned out to be true for approximately 100.00 percent of this week’s inking entries.


It wasn’t quite enough that the definition acknowledged the place name, though; there had to be some logical connection. One that was pretty comically lacking: From “Ayers Rock”: “Oy! Rack!: Well-endowed outback rabbi’s wife.” Yes, the wilds of the Australian Outback are so well known for its rabbinical community.

I expect to extract at least a week’s worth of Style Invitational Ink of the Day graphics from this week’s 30 or so inking entries, several of them from new or seriously infrequent Losers.

While the rules said it didn’t matter if the new word contained all the letters of the place name — and I didn’t consciously choose entries because they did — all four of this week’s “above the fold” neologisms happen to be anagrams of the place name; it certainly does add to the niftiness.

None more so in this week’s Inkin’ Memorial winner, the mordant transformation of “Russia” into “USSRia.”


It’s only the 18th blot of for Invite ink Peter Jenkins since he First-Offended way back in the Czarist era, in Week 497 — but it’s the third time he’s won the contest, and he also has two runner-up blots. That is some high-quality ink in Peter’s little well.

I had no idea until the winners were on the page that second and third place would go to the same person, but I wasn’t astonished that they were by Mark Raffman, who’s now been above the fold 21 times in his 207 inks since Week 979. I assume that Mark will opt for the second-prize Creepy Horse Man rather than a bag or mug (how dumb of me not to use that prize for the horse contest!). And what a happy return for Don Druker of Rockville, Md., who hadn’t been seen in Loserland since a sole appearance in Week 91. Don will move off the One-Hit Wonders list on Elden’s Loser Stats, but presumably will retain his excellent official anagram of Nuder Dork.

Laughed out of Courtney: Copy desk honcho Courtney Rukan was positively gushy over this week’s ink, as she wrote to me in an unsolicited e-mail:
“I LOVE the winner! USSRia is just perfect.
“Baconrot [Bird Waring] is laugh-out-loud funny! Completely gross, but hilarious. I also like Off-blu [newbie Gregory Huyck] for the same reason.
“Demnoises [Jim Stiles] is excellent, especially because Jim characterizes the politicians as “thundering.” Vivid language and so very true – and the sly reference to gopnoises really closes the loop.
“Snobot! Lovely “2001” reference. [Julia Shawhan’s play on Boston was the most imaginative of several Snobot entries.]


“Chattelover [from First Offender Amy Harris] is sassy and smart.

“I like Anti-us [Frank Osen] because it’s true.

“Dubbiah [Jack McBroom] is well played. Even though it’s not outrageous, this one might be my favorite (mainly because I’ll be saying Dubbiah in my head all night in the manner of a corn-fed Big 12 lineman – duhhhhhhbbiah.)

“I almost choked on my water when I read Ponder, Texas. Nice inside joke from Ponder, Tex.”

(Unprintable entries at the bottom of this page.)

We’ll get back to you right away — really!
After only many weeks of not sending Losers an auto-reply to their entries, followed by many more weeks of a NOT-auto reply in which I was actually sending the receipt e-mail myself when I got to a computer, our newsroom IT department seems to have fixed the problem. Now, whenever you send an e-mail to losers@washpost.com, you should quickly get an automatically generated response. If you don’t, please let me know so that I can make the day miserable for tell Will the IT Guy.

Unsavory places: Unprintable entries from Week 1116
Lots of entries this week that the writers desginated “Convo only,” even those that weren’t all that risque. Among the clever-but-no-ways:
From “San Antonio”: “Saint Onan”: Patron of lonesome cow hands. (Chris Doyle)
From “Donner Pass”: Nadsperson: A really specific kind of cannibal. (Jeff Contompasis)
Prince George’s County: No Pricey Negroes, a phrase often found on advertising circulars in Upper Marlboro slave markets in the 1840s (Elden Carnahan)


But the Scarlet Letter this week goes to a typical tour-de-force from anagram savant Jon Gearhart, who we’re hoping is back to his amazing wordplay after suffering a scare a few days ago when he almost totally stopped breathing (Jon lost the use of much of his body after a horrific auto accident years ago):
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania --> Lap Brushing Anniversary: April 1 is the anniversary of the first female fur trappers in Harrisburg. After washing their beavers in the Susquehanna River, they would brush them and stretch out to dry them in the sun.

Also from Jon: Pierre, S. Dakota --> Troika-speared: Having a rare condition where a male is born with three prongs like a wall plug. They usually die lonely because woman can’t adapt.

See some of you on Sunday!