Style Conversational Week 1182, brought to you from dart.edge.orbit The Style Invitational Empress ruminates all over the What3Words contest and a big vat of collective-noun ink. And Loserfest! "stud.help.nest" is the code assigned to one of the myriad 3-meter squares that form the footprint of 1301 K St. NW, The Post's headquarters. The grid of squares appears when you zoom way in. (Screen shot from what3words.com ) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // June 30, 2016 Hello, everyone. Aren’t you glad that, just in time for the three-day weekend, I’m giving you something you can waste massive amounts of holiday time on? Yay for Week 1182 of The Style Invitational . I’d heard about the What3Words project on the radio recently (the tFhree-word addressing system has been adopted by the Mongolian postal service) and then Longtime Loser Doug Frank wrote to me to suggest a contest. And while I’m not sure what will come of it — I confess that both our Artist for Life Bob Staake and the Erstwhile Czar of The Style Invitational were highly skeptical — I remain hopeful and even optimistic that we’ll have a bunch of interesting finds to share, and that Loserly wit and creativity will come into play. What3words.com has lots of explanatory matter, from the simple to the technical, on how the address system was developed, how it’s already being used, and how its creators hope it will be used. It’s a .com, not an .org, because it’s being marketed to businesses for delivery systems as well as a way to get a custom three-word address (e.g., “best.pizza.here”) that will duplicate the real one. But the map is free for all to explore, and was designed to be accessible to just about everyone in the inhabited world; it will work on a smartphone without an Internet connection, which is what a large fraction of the global population has these days. The system is based on latitude and longitude coordinates, but makes them easily used by humans: As the W3W website puts it: “People’s ability to immediately remember 3 words is near perfect, whilst [they use British English] your ability to remember the 16 numbers, decimal points and N/S/E/W prefixes that are required to define the same location using lat,long is zero.” Working from an oversimplified news feature, I’d originally written in the Invite that the 57 trillion 3-meter squares covering the planet were assigned three-word codes at random from a list of 25,000 common words. This was wrong on two counts. First, it turns out, the assignments weren’t quite random; the longest words are saved for the most remote areas; “cornbread.prolifically.shimmies” is off the coast of Antarctica. And the developers even took pains to ensure that similar combinations — for instance, the same three words but in different order — would land at great distances from each other, so that someone sending a package or fire truck could easily see which was the desired address. (Meanwhile, my own Zip code has a Holly Road and Holly Drive in different neighborhoods; I’m hoping that no one plays with matches on either street.) "stud.help.nest" as it appears on the Esri map on What3Words; you don't see the grid of individual squares, but you might get detailed more outlines of buildings. (Screen shot from what3words.com) Second — and this occurred to me past midnight last night — 25,000 words in every possible combination and order, even if the words are repeated within a combination, are not enough to make 57 trillion unique three-word codes. Having no faith in my math skills, I asked (without explaining why) on the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook page how many three-word combinations would come from a 25,000-word-list. Yes, it was 1:07 a.m. By 1:10 a.m. I had several respondents — Doug Frank (who, having suggested the contest, knew what was up), Tim Livengood, Alex Jeffrey, Alex Blackwood, Dave Letizia among them — providing answers, and after I clarified that the total should include repeated words, the told me the answer was simply 25,000 cubed, or a mere 15.625 trillion. So I did some more research and found out that the 25,000-word list was the smallest of lists in at least nine languages being used; the largest (I’m presuming English) is 40,000. So for 57 million combinations — the number of squares on the planet — how many words do you really need? At least 38,485, said Alex Jeffrey. And if you have a list of 40,000, how many possible combinations? “That’d give 64 trillion.” And that is why you could conceivably type in 7 trillion word combinations and not find a single valid one. But it’s okay, because the search box will provide helpful alternatives. Not all the areas that are assigned codes are actually mapped in detail, but a code typed into the search field on the map will tell you the location. This was true of “empress.banished.forever,” which is actually (and appropriately) in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and not so “near Ribeira Grande, Azores,” and it’s totally fine to use such a code for this contest. How precise do you need to be with your discoveries? Well, not very — as long as the wording of your entry doesn’t imply otherwise. For instance, The Washington Post is located in the huge office building One Franklin Square (1301 K St. NW), which takes up almost the whole block on K between 13th and 14th streets, and is quite deep as well. And while The Post doesn’t occupy the whole 13-story building, it does actually cover the whole footprint on the seventh and eighth floors, along with parts of several others. And so it’s totally precise to say that any square in that building belongs to The Post. But: Suppose you found a code in the building that was perfectly fitting for the sports section. Unless you know where in the building the sports department is, you can’t announce that the sports section is situated at wordA.wordB.wordC. But you can say, for example, that the sports section /ought to /move to that square. When Bob Staake found hidden.cave.dinner, the map noted the Central Park Zoo, but it didn’t say if that spot was actually a bear cave or just a parking lot. So “at the Central Park Zoo” is fine, while “the grizzly bear enclosure at the Central Park Zoo” isn’t. Also, you can be more general, maybe much more general: You could just say “In New York City,” for example. But my hunch is that that the cool-coincidence factor will be a lot more interesting in more specific places. It’s hard to anticipate all the questions that people will have with this contest. My main aim, of course, is to provide interesting discoveries to share — especially ones that are funny and/or reflect creativity. I expect that I’ll have to make a few rulings on unforeseen issues in the next few days; the best way to see updates is in the comment thread on the Invitational that posted at the top of the Devotees page. If you have a pressing question and absolutely don’t want tojoin the Devotees (we’re almost at 1,100 members) email me at pat.myers@washpost.com. *A SOVIET OF COLLECTIVE NOUNS*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1178* /(a non-inking entry by Chaz Miller of Silver Spring, Md.) / I couldn’t do a count on the number of individual entries in our Week 1178 contest for collective nouns, or “terms of venery” (I could do the count very easily if I made you send in your entries one at a time, rather than all on one form, but I’m guessing you wouldn’t much want that). Suffice it to say that I received 331 submissions — close to twice what I get in a typical week — and that of those submissions, a whole lot of them contained 25 entries. So “thousands” is a conservative way of putting it. As you can see from this week’s results, most of the inking entries involve some sort of play on a existing collective noun (or unit of measure; I wasn’t going to be rigid here when I needed the funny). So, so many entries didn’t seem even humorously like a group or even a quantity (“a curiosity of scientists,” “a steep of Tea Party members”) that I’d often go through 100 or more entries before finding some good ones. But that’s why The Post pays me dozens of dollars every single week to show you the 52 best rather than just letting everyone share on the website. It’s the fifth win, and 119th ink in all for Dudley Thompson, whose wife, Susan, also got ink this week (for Ink No. 39). Dudley’s “two square meeters of Mormon missionaries” made me laugh out loud — a tall order for this judge this past week. The cuddly dust mite goes to David Kleinbard for his 15th ink “above the fold” — which is especially great because David happens to have a cuddly Junior Junior Loser named Eli. It’s just the ninth blot of ink for Jack McBroom, but his second runner-up entry; and then there’s Jeff Shirley, who might as well have carpeting laid on his continual turf in the Losers’ Circle. *YINZ WANT TO GO TO PITTSBURGH? LOSERFEST, AUG. 25-28* Speaking of collective nouns, I just learned that “yinz” is a regionalism for the second-person plural, the Western Pennsylvania equivalent of the Southern “y’all” and the Mid-Atlantic “youse.” or “yas.” Which makes a bit of sense of Loserfest Pope Kyle Hendrickson’s name for the activity-filled (and belly-filling) Yinzburgh: Loserfest 2016. The Royal Consort and I will be heading up to join the Losers on Friday, Aug. 26 (someone has to put out an Invitational on Thursday), but will still be able to see an election-themed show by the Second City troupe at the O’Reilly Theater, visit Fallingwater, and hopefully even get to roll around in something called Knockerball if only for the photo-op. You can take part in whichever items on the “fungenda” (presumbably a portmanteau of agenda and fungus) appeal to you; you buy your own tickets. But all the information, including the Loserfest room rate at the Omni, is at loserfest.org Make sure you click on the Drivels page to fill out the form so that you’ll be on the emailing list and will be kept current on the plans. *YINZ RATHER JUST GO TO FALLS CHURCH? LOSER BRUNCH SUNDAY, JULY 17* It’s at noon at Grevey’s just outside the Beltway, in a shopping center at Arlington Boulevard (Route 50) and Gallows Road. Not a buffet, but you can get either breakfast or lunch food, both tasty. Sports are on the TVs. I’ll try to go, especially if some new people would like to meet the Losers. RSVP to Elden Carnahan on the Losers’ website, NRARS.org (click on “Our Social Engorgements”). Happy Fourth, all — maybe I’ll see you somewhere around congratulations.fingernails.desk .