The Style Invitational Empress discusses this week’s results, the
new contest and more
The first time we did this contest (dredged up from microfilm). The
results of that contest appear below. (Cartoon by Bob Staake for The
Washington Post)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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September 15, 2016
After judging Style Invitational Week 1189
over
the past week or so, I now know a few more things than I used to:
— There’s something calledgeloscopy
,
which is predicting the future with the tone of a person’s laughter.
— There a great term called a gedankenexperiment, which is an experiment
you work out only in your mind (saves on all those pesky lab costs).
Einstein had the
mind for this sort of thing; your own results may vary.
— There is a hybrid goat-sheep calleda geep
(either a natural
breeding or through futzing with embryos).
An inside page of “Bad Little Children’s Books,” a ollection of
“offensively tweaked” covers of old children’s books. This book has a
special connection to the Invite that I may not reveal. (Abrams Image,
2016 )
— The giant, phallic-looking clam called a geoduck
is pronounced “gooey-duck.”
— In Britain, when people use the Hebrew word “Shabbat” to refer to the
Jewish Sabbath, they don’t use the Hebrew pronunciation “sha-BOTT” as
Americans do; instead, they say “sha-BAT” to rhyme it with “cat,” or
sometimes “Shabbit” to rhyme with “rabbit.” (British dictionaries seem
to disagree on this. What I don’t get is why Britons, if they want to
use their own pronunciation, don’t just use the English word “Sabbath.”
Another option is the Yiddish “Shabbos,” pronounced SHAH-bus.)
— Oh yeah, one more: Many, many people do not know/ cannot figure out
the basic rules for limerick rhyme and meter, even with my handy-dandy
“Get Your ’Rick Rolling”
guide.
First, rhyme. I guess it’s not intuitive that a “perfect rhyme” has
vowels and consonants that match exactly, differing only in the
syllable’s first consonant, and that it’s the last /accented / syllable
of the line that does the rhyming (the explanation makes this so much
harder!). Witness:
A convict who swears he is Irish,
When asked to select his final dish ...
And: cat/ nap; gelatinous/unanimous; dispassion/ assassin;
meddled/pedals/reveled; Eyes met/ sneeze at; Florence/ insurance; safe/
chaise; viable/ fable; lady/ navy; genuine/ nine; the best/ no contest ;
rhetoric/ heretic; silhouettes/ dress; trouble/befuddled; delish /
Yiddish; and gelato / big toe. .
And then there’s rhythm. I thought I had a foolproof explanation with my
“hickory-dickory-dock” trick. But try hickorying to:
My love of wine is genuine
Since I first crossed the river Rhine.
I’ll think of something clearer by next year.
Meanwhile, of course I received plenty of lims that were not just
structurally flawless, but were also creative and clever and funny and
readable and that even had something to say, or a joke to tell. I
published 18 limericks in the paper and eight more online, but there
were plenty of other inkworthies (though perhaps not as many as in some
years).
Three of the four Losers’ Circle winners this week have been inking up
the joint all the time recently, especially with poems: It’s the eighth
win for Melissa Balmain, and Matt Monitto and Jesse Frankovich have been
cleaning up with disturbing regularity as well. But Joe Neff’s clever
“gecko” verse , which links the lizard’s ability to leave its tail (and
not its body) in an attacker’s mouth to “saving 15 percent
,”
marks the first appearance “above the fold” for Joe Neff. Joe’s second
place brings him to 23 blots of Invite ink over the years; he’s dropped
in on Loserland now and again since all the way back in Week 357.
*What Doug Dug: * Ace copy editor Doug Norwood agreed with my first- and
second-place picks, and he also gave a shout-out to Nan Reiner’s zing at
Anthony Weiner, who found himself back in the news just in time for a
“genital” limerick. Nan’s verse does make the print edition; I wanted to
run it just above Mae Scanlan’s limerick about the not-quite-genteel
Style Invitational.
(For the unprintables, see the end of this column.)
*THE COVER STORY: HIS WEEK’S SECOND PRIZE*
I went through some discussion with this week’s prize donor on how best
to describe the donor’s relationship with Arthur C. Gackley, the
long-dead — but surprisingly active on Facebook — author and artist of
this week’s second prize, the brand-new book “Bad Little Children’s
Books.” Let’s just say that this book bears a special kinship with The
Style Invitational; for the real story, I’ll send you tothis link here
.
*IT JUST KEEPS GETTING VERSE: NOW WE’VE GOT POEDS — WEEK 1193
*
I’m always on the lookout for verse forms that might work as an Invite
contest. And sometimes it pays not to look far at all. Proto-Loser Elden
Carnahan, Keeper of the Master Contest List,
also has compiled a number of “theme” pages listing links to all the
horse name contests, all the caption contests, contests about movies,
and many more. And so I called up thePoetry
page and scrolled down.
And seven items down the list, sitting quietly with perhaps a slight
forlorn tremble, ignored for two decades, was the Poed. A look at the
results (see below) didn’t blow me away, but the Loser Community now has
a lot more Verse Aces (not to be confused with Versaces, which is not
what these people tend to wear, in my experience).
In addition to the examples in the picture above that’s the introduction
to Week 172 — the Czar tells me he can’t remember whether it was he or
Mr. Ed who wrote them, although the Unitas one “sounds like me” — here
are the results to the first Poedtry contest: Note that many of the
six-syllable words are made up; that’s fine with me this time as well.
(I do note, though, a couple of violations I wouldn’t bend the rules for.)
/Okay, here’s the Czar talking, introducing the results: /
Very hard contest. Much unseemly grousing and whining from regular
entrants. Apparently, these individuals feel licensed to complain just
because they have become virtually full-time employees of The Washington
Post, albeit ones paid entirely in T-shirts, bumper stickers and the
occasional Remote Controlled Fart Machine. Our favorite whine came from
William Foster of Rockville, who finds us dreadfully lowbrow. William
writes in iambic pentameter:
’Tis clear, Style Invitational decides
its winners from submissions worst in taste.
And queer: Style Invitational derides
the brain, and lives with things below the waist.
Hey, pal. Live with this.And now to the Poeds:
/Fourth Runner-Up: /
The world needs a new word
Meaning: chatting, smiling.
Handsomely advising --
Stephanopoulizing! (David Smith, Greenbelt)
/Third Runner-Up:/
If wed now, she’d choose a
hyphened, lengthy, awkward
cognomen: Juliet
Montague-Capulet.
(Jean Sorensen, Herndon)
/Second Runner-Up: /
How is it that, with Bill,
Scandal eludes nation?
Gennifer, Whitewater . . .
Press-tidigitation?
(Marcy Dilworth, Fairfax)
/First Runner-Up: /
If it’s 2 long 2 st8
Abridge, abbrev., trunc8.
Acronym R&D,
Washingtonology.
(Jennifer Hart, Arlington)
And the winner of the vintage Jimmy Carter toilet paper:
Mom, a Jew. Pop, a WASP.
Easter, Pesach, Christmas.
Communions, Tallises,
Psychoanalysis.
(Roger L. Browdy, Kensington)
/Honorable Mentions:/
Buy the toys and see the
Disney summer movie.
Marketing strategies?
Quasimodalities.
(Jennifer Hart, Arlington)
Catch. Run. Bunt. Slide. Hit. Throw.
Iron fellow’s agile.
Orioles’ security?
Supercalifragile.
(Helen E. Gallant, Silver Spring) [No way does “security” have three
syllables. Oops.]
Can’t get your sleep at night?
Torrid flashes awful?
Estrogen prescription!
Peri-menopausal.
(Beryl Benderly, Washington)
Damn you. Damn you. Damn you.
Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!
Damnation! Damnation!
Excommunication.
(David M. Johnston, Chapel Hill, N.C.)
Dreck Tex Mex -- good as sex
Taco? Thanky mucho.
Burrito? Whizbanga!
Gimmeechimichanga.
(Jennifer Hart, Arlington)
like e.e., i too shun
elite upper cases.
egotist inflation!
capitalization.
(Susan Reese, Arlington)
Our lives are too laid back.
Human strivings sated.
Casual, lethargic.
Californicated.
(Sandra George, Washington)
Pink or blue? He or she?
Also factor rhesus.
Resolving mystery --
Amniocentesis.
(Lillian B. Broadwick, Monkton, Md.)
Been there, seen it, done that.
Jaded, jaundiced prism.
Yadadda regatta.
Existentialism.
(Sandra George, Washington)
Bring the child out o’ me.
Tissue’s almost tearing.
Physician! Incision!
Episiotomy.
(Sandra Hull, Arlington) [Yeow. No rhyme, in my book.]
I must get rid of them:
Endless Loser’s T-Shirts.
Sellable? Tradable?
Biodegradable?
(David Smith, Greenbelt)
/-- And Last:/
Theear that no one reads
,
Filling unknown terrain.
Close-guarded mystery
Andsoitshallremain.
(Carl Yaffe, Rockville)
*BRUNCH THIS SUNDAY! *
At Chadwicks in Old Town Alexandria at noon. I can’t be there but
numerous people have RSVP’d. See “Our Social Engorgements” at NRARS.org
to let Elden Carnahan know you’ll be coming. Next
month: We’re up at the Victoria Gastro Pub in Columbia, Md., on Oct. 16.
I’m planning to go.
*LIMERISQUE*: Unprintables from Week 1189*
/*Supplied just for this use by Jeff Contompasis/
In keeping with limericks’ long tradition of bawdiness, quite a few I
received would never pass muster with The Post’s Taste Police. Several
of them were for “gerbil,” specifically the old and roundly
unsubstantiated rumor that actor Richard Gere used to play with them in
a not-very-nice way. I sneaked Frank Osen’s oblique no-names reference
into the online Invitational, but I couldn’t use, say, this excellent
one by Jesse Frankovich:
Richard’s doctor, quite shocked, said, “Oh, dear!
There’s a burrowing rodent in here!
And to make matters worse,
It won’t move in reverse —
Seems the gerbil is stuck in this Gere.”
Then we have the problem of taboo words in The Post; otherwise I’d at
least have considered this one about geophagy, the compulsion to eat dirt:
Geophagy: When as a child
I’d eat clay and would drive my folks wild,
Dad called me a sod
And gave me a hod
And he made me s--- bricks, neatly piled. (Dave East of Burton Latimer,
Northamptonshire, England)
”And one more, this from — huh! (just looked it up) — Howard Walderman,
the most gentlemanly of Losers:
A fencer with large genitalia
Told his wife “Oh, they never will fail ya.”
He said, “ You can see —
“It’s plain as can be —
“I’ve two things with which to impale ya.”