Style Conversational Week 1164: Can you do an NPR A-B-C?
The Style Invitational Empress ruminates daintily all over this
week’s contest and results
Lanky as Honest Abe, (Roger Dalrymple, Gettysburg, Pa.) once again
invites us up for brunch and a tour. See Meet the Parentheses below. (By
Bob Dreyer)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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February 25, 2016
I don’t watch much TV, but I listen to the radio almost nonstop, and
I’ve been an NPR junkie for decades. On weekend mornings — both Saturday
and Sunday on D.C.’s WAMU
— I’ll
usually catch at least part of “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me.” And I’ll
always find myself laughing out loud at something or other.
The very funny Peter Sagal hosts the hourlong show out of Chicago before
an enthusiastic live audience, offering up a variety of ways for his
three panelists — a rotating roster of writers and comedians — to get in
lots of quick, sharp quips; I’m especially partial to the brilliant Mo
Rocca. Listeners get to call in to play as well: “Wait Wait” might be
the only big contest with less valuable prize swag than The Style
Invitational; winning listeners get NPR eminence Karl Kasell’s voice on
their voicemail.
The show (see all sorts of clips and transcriptshere
)
starts off with a news quiz with both serious and offbeat questions
about news of the past week, and there’s a gimme bit where a caller has
to guess the last rhyming word in a limerick. But most of the segments
are various multiple-choice guessing games, one of which we’re ripping
off honoring in Invite Week 1164 .
*This is going to be a hard contest *because an entry can’t just be a
quiz question; it has to be a quiz question that’s interesting and even
funny. First of all, you have to find an interesting fact to ask about;
while “Wait Wait” uses recent news items, I’m opening it up to all sorts
of trivia (though recent news might still work best). And then — and I
think this will be the harder part — you have to write two interesting
/wrong/ answers. The “Wait Wait” writers do this very well, and I have a
hunch that I’ll be appreciating their work more and more as I begin to
grimace in despair over a slew of boring and/or unfunny entries. But you
know, it’s /fine / if there’s a slew of boring and/or unfunny entries —
because the only ones that matter are the good ones. And I’m confident
that the Loser Community will yield the dozen or 15 terrific
multiple-choicers that will fill the Style Invitational page four
Sundays from now.
*Yes, of course *you need to tell me which of your choices is the right
answer! In fact, I’d like you to cite a source for your Amazing but True
fact, preferably one that I can easily look at. Please don’t embed links
in the middle of a sentence, because it will turn into gibberish when I
combine everyone’s email into one big text file for judging.
This would be a good format for entries:
Question:
A. xxxxx
B. xxxxxx
C. xxxxxxx
( correct answer is B; I saw it on the New York Times’s website last week)
(link to Times story)
I’m of course excited that “Wait Wait” panelist Roxanne Roberts agreed
to help out and weigh in on the finalists. I’ve worked with Roxanne in
The Post’s Style section ever since she started as a copy aide in the
1980s, then as she put on high heels night after night covering
big-ticket social events as Style’s “party reporter,” and then for her
many years as the co-writer (with Amy Argetsinger) of Style’s
gossip/celebrity column, The Reliable Source. In recent years Rox has
been able to live a marginally saner existence as a reporter on
everything from power grabs at the Kennedy Center to the planning that’s
already going on for the next Inauguration. Most recently she covered
the Scalia funeral. And of course she regularly jets out to Chicago to
do “Wait Wait.”
So I’m delighted that Roxanne has given her blessing to Week 1164 and
that she’ll weigh in on the finalists. And maybe — it would be many
months from now — I can persuade her to give the winner one of the
amazingly gorgeous and intricate Christmas cookies
she makes every year.
*FAUX-WORD MARCH!* THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1160*
/(Non-inking headline suggestion by Beverley Sharp)/
Our contest for new meanings for existing words brought forth some 1,700
entries, of which only 1,500 or so stank. Which means that even though I
gave ink to more than 50 entries
from
Week 1160, perhaps 150 others were inkworthy as well. Did all 25 of your
entries make my anonymous shortlist only to get bupkis? Maybe! The only
names I checked were those for the inking entries. So go ahead,
overestimate yourself out.
The entries I received fell into three types, two of which I used. Most
retained the pronunciation of the original word, but made you think of
different meanings of the word (“scatterbrain” as a stage direction) or
make you think of a different word with the same pronunciation (“yo-yo”
as a greeting between friends). The second type is the opposite: You
have to change the pronunciation so that you’ll be evoking different
words with the same spelling (e.g., “pageant” as “page ant”; “Testicles”
as a Greek philosopher). The second type is more of a challenge for the
reader, but perhaps more rewarding for the investment of a second or two
to figure it out.
Because I stated in the directions that the definition “shouldn’t be a
cynical interpretation of the word’s actual meaning,” I tossed that
third type, the “Devil’s Dictionary”-type definitions, for which we’ve
had several contests already. These included such otherwise worthy
entries as “Trickle down: when the indigent get the effluent of the
affluent” (Kel Nagel) and “Sleep: Most common object lost by adults”
(Robyn Carlson).
As I’d advised in the Week 1160 Style Conversational
, fake definitions for obscure words probably
wouldn’t be as funny as fake definitions for familiar words, because the
reader can’t say, “Ha — I never thought of those letters as meaning
/that/!” So a play on “vernalagia” or “tarantism” isn’t going to work as
well as a play on “Oregon” or “stud poker.”
Frank Osen, the Losers’ current Loser of the Year, marks his 12th win.
Because Frank has been playing the Invite just a few years, all those
wins were for the current Invite trophy, the Inkin’ Memorial. So this
time I’m going to send him my last intact Inker, the paper-bag-headed
“Thinker” statuette that the Empress gave out from 2004 until she
couldn’t find any more and had to switch trophies in 2012. I have one
more Inker after that, courtesy of Loser Christopher Lamora, who gave
all six of his back to me; it’s just missing the base.
Meanwhile, runners-up Howard Walderman and Danielle Nowlin are familiar
denizens of “above-the-fold” territory, but it’s the second trip to the
Losers’ Circle, and the 16th blot of ink in all, for Joanne Free, who
gave us “scatterbrain.”
I’m glad I bought more stamps last week — I’ll be sending prizes to, I
think, 35 Losers among the 51 inking entry.
*What Doug Dug* and *Laugh out of Courtney:* My copy-editing colleagues
hadn’t been weighing in lately with their faves because they’d been
working on other projects. But this week Doug told me he especially
liked all four top entries plus Andrea Dewhurst’s “pothole,” the two
different “testicles” entries (by Mark Raffman and First Offender Thor
Rudebeck) and Mark’s “twist.” Courtney says she was “tickled” by Frank’s
winner; her other faves were “typeface” (Ben Aronin), “paleontology”
(Danielle Nowlin).
*MEET THE PARENTHESES: (Roger Dalrymple, Gettysburg, Pa.) *
/Roger is one of several members of our Gettysburg Loser Bureau (along
with Marty McCullen, Bill Collinge and Christina Courtney). Over the
years, he’s come down to the D.C. area for many Loser events, but
Roger’s most notable, Loserwise, for arranging — every year since 2008 —
a Loser brunch and then leading a several-stop tour of the Gettysburg
battlefields, to explain the fateful events of the unanticipated
three-day fight in July 1863 that turned the tide of the Civil War. This
year’s brunch/tour, as Roger notes below, won’t be in authentic
midsummer heat. /
*Age*: 67, but i don’t feel nearly that old. More like 65.
*Where you live:* Gettysburg is our retirement home — Pam and I moved up
here in 2001 from the D.C. area after I spent 34 years with the
Department of Defense, mostly in arms control. Gettysburg has the
benefits of being near family (okay, that’s a mixed bag); a college with
a lot of cultural programs that get us out of the house now and again ..
oh, and some history that happened here. I’ve given a lot of tours of
the battlefields and other landmarks — including, for several years, a
tour following the annual Loser brunch. (See below.)
*What would someone be surprised to learn about you? * I’m an
accomplished liar. I often throw semi-outrageous statements at family,
friends, coworkers, etc., just to see if anyone calls me on them.
Normally, they don’t. And now, a bunch of guys at work think a
particular candidate for public office has an IQ of 63.
Also, Loser Dave Prevar was my classmate at Landover Hills Elementary
School. (We reunited through the Invitational, a few years later.)
*Your official Loser anagram: * “Elderly Program.” Hmph.
*What do people who’ve never heard of the Invite know you as? * Opa (I
have five grands), Husband (46 years and counting), Dad (two fine sons
who, I do not believe, know I am a Loser), Retiree, Volunteer (Habitat
for Humanity, Ruth’s Harvest, Road Scholar, ESL, etc.) and an inveterate
smartass.
*How much ink do you have; how long have you been playing? *I have 95
inks, including a couple of wins, but I’ve been doing this forever,
something like 15 years. I’ve always been glad that Pat doesn’t print
our “inking average”; mine would be ridiculously low. I’ve always wanted
to be Loser of the year, but people who are actually good at this keep
getting in my way. I do already have a draft of my acceptance speech.
*What are your hopes and dreams for the Invite? *To meet the Czar would
be awesome. However, so far, he’s avoided every event I’ve attended.
*What brought you to Loserdom? * I just kind of bumped into it in The
Post; I mailed in my first entry on a postcard. (Pam and I used to
create our entries together: I would do the first draft and she would
tell me how lame it was.) I found that I enjoyed slipping one past the
goalie now and again, and still find it bizarrely rewarding to see my
name in print — it’s funny how many friends and family and even a few
strangers have seen my name in the contest. One young lady even asked
for my autograph, but declined to pay for it.
*Some favorite entries you’d like to share?*
One of my first inks was when the Czar was still on the throne: for a
contest for bad job choices, my entry was “Superman: Kryptonite
salesman.” (The Czar disqualified but cited my idea for Bill Clinton:
internist.)
Much more recentlyin Week 1126 , the caption
for Drawing 3: “Joyce regrets that the same doctor did her eyelids and
her breast implants.”
*So what’s in store for this year’s Gettysburg Loser Brunch and Tour? *
First of all, the Losers — a record 17 — who sweltered through last
year’s heat-of-summer event will be happy to know that this year we’ll
be gathering on Sunday, Nov. 13. for lunch at one of our many eateries.
For this year’s tour, we’re thinking of walking the Soldiers National
Cemetery, then driving over to visit such famed battle sites as Little
Round Top, where Chamberlain saved the Union left flank, and perhaps the
bloody angle, where Pickett’s charge was repulsed. But with a bit of
notice I’d be happy to add or substitute sites of particular Loser
interest.
*So if you’re an accomplished liar, what did you lie about in here? *
Well, technically, I don’t dream about the Czar.