Style Conversational Week 1194: We’re chain-smoked! The Style Invitational Empress talks about this week’s new contest and results If we had had the room, and the time, and the skill, we could have run the results of the Week 1190 name chain contest as a graphic, like this one for Chris Doyle's Inkin' Memorial winner. (Inept collage by Pat Myers/The Washington Post) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // September 22, 2016 /(“We’re chain-smoked” was a non-inking suggestion by Danielle Nowlin for the Week 1190 honorable-mentions subhead)/ I distinctly remember swearing after our last Style Invitational name-chain contest that I’d never do another one. But except for grudges and the like, I tend not to remember much stuff that happened nine years ago, and I have to put up 52 contests or so a year ... Actually, judging Week 1190 was fun, for the most part, because (and really, this is why I ran it) I knew I’d find plenty of ingenious and clever chains inthis week’s results. It helped a lot this time around that the chains had to have 15 names or fewer, rather than the exactly 25 of the previous Invite contests (this is better for readers as well, I think), and that I encouraged entrants to include explanations of connections they thought might be a bit subtle. Not everyone obliged, but I was grateful to those who did, because I was sometimes utterly flummoxed as I systematically read from name to name, checking off each one on a printout as a valid link, starring it if it was a clever one. Somehow, for example, I think Todd DeLap’s expectations of our knowledge and mental flexibility might have been a wee bit high for this one (though he did get ink with two other, less head-scratching chains): /Marilyn Monroe, Mahé Drysdale, Seychelles, Mary Anning, Peyton Manning, “Up”, Kate Upton, “Uptown Girl”, “Back in the U.S.S.R”, Mikhail Gorbachev, Darryl Strawberry, W.C. Fields, Elton John, Marilyn Monroe,/ /Explanation: Monroe=Man Row=Olympic Rower Mahé Drysdale, Mahé is an island in the Seychelles, Mary Anning is the source of the “She sells sea shells by the sea shore” tongue twister (and was an impressive scientist! Her Wikipedia page is worth a read.), “Man Up” (or “Pay Up!”), Billy Joel recorded both “Uptown Girl” and a cover of “Back in the U.S.S.R”, Gorbachev had a strawberry birthmark, “Strawberry Fields”, WC/John, Elton John sang “Candle in the Wind” about Marilyn Monroe./ OHHHHH. // //As I mention in the introduction to this week’s results, this contest is the epitome of the fine line we have to draw with a lot of Invite humor: Jokes are often funnier when you don’t spell out the punchline, but let the reader spend a second or two to discover it in his own head, /but/ if the reader can’t do that, for whatever reason, there’s no joke. I don’t expect that every reader will get every link in every entry; this is why I referred people to the top thread on theStyle Invitational Devotees page on Facebook, where, as I’m writing right now (a few minutes after posting a link to the Invite there), I’m certain that people are asking the crowd for explanations. Part of the challenge is that the links are on different levels. First, there’s one that connects the items merely because of a similarity of their names. Once you start thinking beyond that, it’s sometimes easy to miss that level entirely; I went to the Devotees page to ask for help on Nikola Tesla/ Coca-Cola , and got all sorts or ruminations on pouring Coke on battery terminals and such, until someone pointed out niKOLA /coca-COLA. Then there are ones that connect the people’s actual qualities or accomplishments, which require actual knowledge of who they are. Where I added links in the results, they’re mostly to show readers that an actor played a certain character, or someone was married to someone else. (I know I didn’t add the links consistently; don’t take the presence or absence of a link to mean I thought it was either obscure or obvious.) In my book, the best name-chain clues are those in which you have to use the word in a different meaning to understand the link. I laughed out loud, for example, to Larry Yungk’s connection of the movie western “Red River” with Megyn Kelly. (His entry didn’t get ink because of a similarly clever but unfairly misleading link between ex-pitcher/current offensive person Curt Schilling and KKK.) A number of this week’s inking entries have such wordplay; Duncan Stevens’s “Tiny Bubbles”-Donald Trump made me giggle. I did not generally link to explanations for these; those will be your moments of discovery, and your biggest payoff in a contest that’s no doubt more fun to /do/ than to read. (Another one: Beverley Sharp’s: “Camelot”/ “Lawrence of Arabia.”) As always, I don’t penalize people for misspelling names — but wow, there were a /ton/ of misspellings this week; I only hope I caught them all in this week’s inking entries. And once again — it’s been /eight years,/ folks — people misspelled “Barack Obama.” There were also some links with inaccurate premises; For example, Mozart can’t link to “Die Fledermaus” (and then on to Deflategate), because “Fledermaus” was written not by Mozart, but about a century later by Johann Strauss Jr. (Adding a link of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” since both are light operas with spoken dialogue, would have been valid but bleh.) A lot of people disregarded the instruction that all the elements in the chain be proper nouns, i.e., given names of someone or something. Hershey’s Kisses, proper noun; cotton candy, not. Victoria’s Secret, proper noun, Lacy Underthings, not, even if you capi­tal­ize it (although it /would/ be a great name for a stripper). Once in a while I could simply turn a common noun into a proper noun as a movie title or something, but usually entries with common-noun links were doomed. I’m glad I changed my mind belatedly and let people use more than one title in their chains. I had put up that restriction to mirror the New York Magazine Competition rule I’d seen, to honor the memory of Mary Ann Madden, but that would have ruled out lots of great chains with no benefit. Keeping it to all names is different; a reader would sense that rule as an essential quality of the contest. Well, if anyone was wondering why this Chris Doyle guy is the highest-inking Loser in The Style Invitational’s history ... As usual, I assembled my list of winners and honorable mentions on Tuesday, still with no names attached, then searched through the submissions to see who’d written each one. And the winner is ... oh, it’s Chris. . How novel. And how about this one? And this one? And this one? Repeat up to 7, plus a couple that got trimmed from the final cut. This mark’s Chris’s /fifty-fourth / Invite win. And that’s since he migrated here in 2000 upon the retirement of ... the New York Magazine Competition. Understandably and thankfully, Chris is taking a pass on receiving any more Inkin’ Memorials, so our remaining Bobble-Lincs will last a little farther into January before we start with a different first-place trophy. It’s another Invitational Hall of Famer (or newest) in second place: Jeff Contompasis gets his 44th “above the fold” ink; that and an honorable mention put him at 526 blots. Hildy Zampella continues her rookie-phenomenality with her fourth trip to the Losers’ Circle and Inks 19 and 20, most of them in the past few months. And our fourth-place finisher is a welcome Blast From the Past: Sue Lin Chong last got Invite ink in 2012, but most of her 182 blots are from our first decade or so. We hope this isn’t just a quick drop-by from Sue Lin. Last, I did want to thank whoever it was who began the chain with Christian Grey and ended it with Pat Myers. Yes, I make you suffer, over and over — but you keep coming back for more, don’t you? Thwack. You love it. (I just looked it up — oh, it’s newbie Nathanael Dewhurst, up in Massachusetts. He doesn’t even know me!) *DISTRACTED DERIVING: THIS WEEK’S CONTEST* When Loser John O’Byrne sent me a scanned copy of New York Magazine’s results of its Competition 927 (he’s also been assiduously sending me links when he finds other NYMag results online) I went to Elden Carnahan’s Master Contest List to see when the Invite had last asked for bogus derivations of words — and was a bit shocked to find that we never had. We did ask at least twice for explanations of where various phrases and expressions came from, but, it seems, never for individual words. (The Week 1046 winner, from Frank Osen: “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?” was actually an expression of surprise among ancient Greeks that Helen of Troy was so beautiful, since it was customary for the Greek queen to use her forehead to butt new vessels into the water.) I’ve uploaded thephoto of the NYM page on Flickr , which lets you click on the photo to enlarge it to a readable size. Most of those entries include dictionary-style abbreviations, for faux authenticity; I doubt that I’d run all the entries in that style; I’d rather the explanations be funny and easy to read rather than sounds-just-like-the-OED. If you can do both, though, more power to you. By the way, who won that New York Magazine contest? Why, it was Chris Doyle of Burke, Va.! Also getting ink in the contest, which had a one-entry-per-person rule: Karen Bracey, Chris’s wife. And Chris’s good friend (and one-ink Loser) Inger Pettygrove. We’re so happy to have Chris with us. And we have no problem crediting him over and over.