Style Conversational Week 1145: Four — all it’s worth
The Tour de Fours contest, plus one of the Invite’s most dogged
contestants
Style Invitational Hall of Famer (Brendan Beary, Great Mills, Md.) with
Milo (right). Brendan is the subject of this week’s “Meet the
Parentheses,” below. (By Terri Griest)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
Email //
Bio //
Follow //
October 15, 2015
I concede that there’s no intrinsic oh-neat quality about our annual
Tour de Fours neologism challenge: It’s not
like, say, the one in which you made up a new word by spelling a real
word backward (and usually relating it to the original); or even the
classic task of changing the word by one letter. Here, the words simply
have to include a totally arbitrary block of four letters; it’s just
some way to reduce the scope of the contest from All the Words in the
World.
Still, our 11 previous Tours de Fours have yielded plenty of clever
neologisms every year we’ve run the contest. . Here, as random example,
are 10 entries from 2013, for S-A-N-E (I just noticed that the top three
winners were all named Christopher):
1.*Senatorpedo:* Cruz missile. “The tea party’s vaunted senatorpedo
self-destructed shortly after its launch.” (Chris Doyle)
2. *Snyder sneak:* A football play in which the team owner dives
backward while everyone else continues to move forward. Usually used
only for short gains. (Chris Damm)
3. *Condé Nasty:* A guide to the places you definitely don’t want to go
on vacation. (Christopher Lamora)
4. *Stanes: *An unsuccessful brand of underwear. (Rob Huffman)
**Sea snot:* Raw oysters. (Larry Gray)*
*Prattlesnake:* A person who spends half an hour encouraging you to let
it all out, then turns around and tells everyone what you said. (Kyle
Hendrickson, Danielle Nowlin)
** *Buyenas:* Vicious creatures that attack big-box stores in feeding
frenzies the day after Thanksgiving. (Ben Aronin)
*Bellyjeans:* What you need to change into after too much Easter candy.
(Randy Lee)
*Congressmensa: *Washington’s most exclusive club — no one qualifies for
it. (John Bunyan)
And Last: *Inanesylum: *The Style Invitational. (Frank Osen)
Note that while there’s no/requirement/ that the neologism be a play on
an existing word, most of our winning entries are. Also note that six of
the 10 are portmanteau words, overlapping two existing words. And
there’s even a spoonerism: Randy Lee’s “bellyjeans.” So while we’ve had
separate contests for those forms, we’ve had great ink for them in the
Tours as well.
/Note to Week 1145 entrants: / It’s not necessary to boldface,
capitalize or otherwise highlight the DICE block in your word; the
boldface will get lost in transit from e-mail to my compiled One Big
List of Entries, and I definitely won’t be capitalizing the pertinent
letters in the results.
The Head-Messers (and Mses): The results of Week 1141
Mess With Our Heads is probably my favorite of all the contests to
judge. (Song parodies are my other favorite, but they require a lot more
hours of judging time.) Not only do I enjoy spoofing newspapers and
headline-writing in particular (since I used to be paid in U.S. dollars
to do it), but I /always /find myself laughing out loud at dozens of
entries.
Certainly that was true in Week 1141,
for which my shortlist ran to 120 bank headlines. I noticed that a
disproportionate number of the heads used were from the week’s print
editions, which meant that a lot of people ended up using the same
headlines — often with the same general joke. But usually there was one
entry that outearned its ilk for ink. Its ink-ilk.
As I’d noted before, I tended to go with heads whose actual meanings
were more or less obvious; that way the reader can laugh more easily at
how you reinterpret it This one by Frank Osen almost made it anyway, but
I cut it in the final trim:
Reports suggest Clinton has gained 2 inches since her last run. But how?
/Benghazi committee chair wants her nose measured before and after
testimony/
The story
,
oddly enough, was actually what the headline says: Feature stories in
2008 described Hillary Clinton at 5-5, but recent ones say she’s 5-7.
I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that all four of this week’s
“above-the-fold” ink blotters are from the D.C. area and (I’m going to
assume because I want to) read hundreds of headlines every week in the
print Post they subscribe to. Whatever, it was the perfect venue once
again for Danielle Nowlin’s fresh, tuned-in humor, giving her a seventh
first-place win, 24th above the fold, and her 176th blot of ink — and
177th, 178th and 179th.
Meanwhile, it’s the fourth ATF ink for first runner-up Rob Wolf, the
38th overall for the suburban Maryland wrestling coach, for his Exhibit
A for How a Peepee Joke Can Be Brilliantly Clever. Duncan Stevens gets
his very first trip to the Losers’ Circle with his Palin dig (it also
was short enough to go out on today’s tweet linking to the Invite). And
it’s Ink No. 80, 10th above the fold, for Pie Snelson, whom all Loser
event-goers know as the woman who keeps track of who’s who at the
brunches and who gives out so many door prizes at Loser parties. (Pie’s
first name is a nickname, by the way, as in Cutie Pie. Her real first
name is Crème Brûlée.)
*Dug by Doug AND Laughed Out of Courtney (AND the Czar): * Not only did
I rob Frank Osen of ink with the Hillary headline, but it was unanimous
among my go-to Post editors that the week’s funniest entry was his
honorable mention “Name the panda Elvis” / “CIA reveals Bin Laden’s
cryptic last words.” Copy chief Courtney Rukan, my former boss Doug
Norwood and my predecessor in Invitedom Gene Weingarten all told me
(separately) that that entry was their fave.
MEET THE PARENTHESES: (Brendan Beary, Great Mills, Md.)
As the second in our series of showing you the people behind the ink
blots (see last week’s Conversational for the
one on Jon Gearhart), we present Hall of Famer — who’s almost at the
doorsteps of the Double Hall — Brendan Beary, who sent in the following,
answering the questions I posted on the Style Invitational Devotees
page. Brendan, who has won The Style Invitational 36 times, is
enormously self-effacing; I, not he, added the links to entries and
poems he refers to.
*Name, age: *
Brendan Beary. Age 53. And a half. People are always surprised; they say
I look like I’m 54 already, but no, still 53, I’m just big for my age.
*Where you live: *
Great Mills, Md., down in St. Mary’s County. I don’t have anything funny
to say about that.
*Your official Loser anagram ,
plus a couple of alternatives if you know some:*
It used to be “B, A NEARBY NERD,” but at some point it got changed to
“RAN BEERY BAND,” which I don’t like quite as much. I just discovered
while cogitating on this answer that it could also be “BEANERY BRAND,”
and my wife and dogs can attest to the fact that, owing to certain
gastrointestinal traits, this might be more appropriate.
*What do people who’ve never heard of the Invite know you as?*
What they know of me can be summed up in a single word: “Who?” I
occasionally write poetry that gets published elsewhere
(sometimes even real ink-and-paper published, but mostly just
1s-and-0s), but aside from that, I’m a spectacularly dull person. Sloths
come and observe me when they develop anxiety disorders and need to
learn to relax.
*How much ink do you have; how long have you been playing?*
On the day I looked it up for this assignment, I was at 976 – but that
doesn’t count the massive haul I got in today’s results, including the
winner, right? (RIGHT??). I’ve been entering since 1996, though the
first few years, and these last few years, have been sort of sporadic.
Right now I’m just plugging away till I get to 1,000, because that when
Mr. Graham said he gets us fully vested in the Post’s pension plan.
*What brought you to Loserdom?
*I moved to Maryland in 1996, and when I saw how distressingly few fart
jokes were in the Baltimore Sun, I started reading The Post. The first
time I found the Invitational, I could hardly believe it; it was as if
Mad Magazine had managed to sneak into the pages of a real
honest-to-gosh newspaper. I loved the air of freewheeling anarchy (as
opposed to an air of deliberate introspective anarchy) that it gave off;
it was like listening in at the smartass kids’ table at your high school
lunchroom. Eventually I overcame my awkward sense of hero worship and
started attending Loser events, at which point I concluded: No, it’s
more like the smartass table of a middle school lunchroom.
*What are three favorite entries you’d like to share? *
A lot of what I ink with is verse contests [such as this one
],
which tend to run long, so in the interest of brevity I’ll go with some
other stuff.
/Week 547 (corporate good names/bad names/: No Nonsense Sheer Endurance:
it’s a good name for pantyhose; it’s a bad name for an escort service.
/Week 580 (combine 2 countries and describe the result):/ Netherlands +
Fiji = Netheriji – but I don’t know anything about it; I’ve been warned
since age 12 not to play with Netherijians.
/Week 671 (Hyphen the Terrible):/ Trou-droponic: adj. Clintonian.
*What’s an example of something you do (or an anecdote about something
you’ve done) that confirms your Loserosity?
* I go through the entire Wikipedia aggregation of “Recent Deaths” as
preparation for the year-end Dead Letters contest. According to
Wikipedia, about 3,000 people die every year; can you believe it? This
is great for finding obscure people to write elegies for, and I’ve
gotten ink in the past with somereally obscure ones
, but unfortunately Wikipedia
seems to be strongly biased in favor of cricket players and Estonian
legislators – two groups that don’t tend to generate a lot of
Invitational ink, or at least not as much as they used to.
---------
Brendan is pictured on this page with his dog Milo, but it was his dog
Otis whom he immortalized in an absolutely lovely poem, one that he read
last year at a program of light verse at Catholic University. It
singlehandedly disproves any snobbish argument that poems in strict
meter, with perfect rhymes, with very funny lines throughout, cannot be
/art/ of a high order. Here it is
in
the poetry journal Light. It’s long, but you should take time to read
every word.
WATCH THE EMPRESS OF THE STYLE INVITATIONAL EAT FRENCH TOAST
The Loser Brunch Tour makes its stop this month north of the Capital
Beltway: Brunch No. 181 will be this Sunday at noon at Victoria Gastro
Pub in Columbia, Md., not far from I-95 between D.C. and Baltimore.
Losers or just abject fans in the vicinity who’d like to join us (we’re
currently at 14 people), RSVP on Elden Carnahan’s Loser website at
NRARS.org (click on “Our Social Engorgements” at the top). Or just use
thishandy-dandy link . Drop me
a line, too.