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
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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.