Style Conversational Week 1200. That would be twelve. hundred.
The Style Invitational Empress discusses this week’s new contest and
results
Infiltrating our schools: Veteran Loserbard Melissa Balmain uses the
compare-and-contrast word list from Style Invitational Week 1167 as
prompts for the poetry class she teaches at the University of Rochester.
(Courtesy of Melissa Balmain)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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November 3, 2016
In today’s media world it’s not exactly a big selling point to remind
people, “We’re really old!” But seeing “Week 1200” in this week’s Style
Invitational headline literally thrilled me; I
actually felt a tremor of delighted amazement. And I’m heartened as well
to see lots of life in the old nag yet: Each week brings at least some,
and sometimes dozens, of brand-new entrants, and the list of subscribers
to the Thursday afternoon email newsletters now pushes toward 9,000.
Admittedly, these numbers still put us on the edge of the cult-following
category, but then again, the Invite is basically a one-person
operation, so if the entries, say, suddenly doubled, I’d have a pretty
hard time running this contest.
Okay, I also admit that the “12” angle in this week’s contest is pretty
lame, but that shouldn’t hurt the quality of results. A 12-word “Devil’s
Dictionary” entry might well fit on Twitter; maybe we could start a
#DozenDictionary hashtag. (An entry’s tweetability won’t factor into my
judging, however.)
Our Week 860 contest, from 2010, was pegged to a new British website
called Ten Word Wiki (which seems to have defuncticized itself not long
afterward). And the requirement was that the definition, regardless of
the term being defined, be exactly 10 words. So I just had to find some
two-word terms and ding! — examples for this week’s contest. (I did
change the rule about hyphens; last time hyphenated compounds counted as
one word instead of two.)
*Here are some of the inking entries from six years ago;* see the whole
list here
(scroll down past that week’s new contest). Note that it’s a stretch to
call some of these entries “definitions.” I plan to be similarly Mrs.
Incredible this time around as well. When I say that two words joined by
a hyphen count as two words, I’m not talking about prefixes or suffixes
attached with hyphens, as in “co-worker.” That’s one word. “Seven-layer
dip” would count as three words.
The winner of the Inker: Historical revisionism: Now the past has been
torched by a new generation. (Phil Frankenfeld, Washington)
2. La Leche League: Front organization dedicated to promoting the
kindness of human milk. (Kevin Dopart, Washington)
3. Elin Nordegren: Had Tiger by the tail. Now has a different grip. (Cy
Gardner, Arlington)
4.Thesaurus: Language reference to help people find exactly the wrong
word. (Ron Averyt, Severn)
Worth 1% of a picture: Honorable mentions
Advice: Opinions sought to confirm the correctness of our bad ideas.
(Russell Beland, Fairfax)
Amnesia: A mental condition that, for all you know, you’ve experienced.
(Russell Beland)
Jack Bauer: Complete verbal repertoire: “Chloe!,” “Dammit!” and “We have
no choice!” (Craig Dykstra, Centreville)
Glenn Beck: He’s a walking aneurysm looking for a brain to attack. (Cy
Gardner)
China: Mean country that won’t let America keep adorable Chinese pandas.
(Mae Scanlan, Washington)
Credit card: Loans for people who find subprime mortgages much too
conservative. (Sam Bruce, New York)
Charles Darwin: Victorian scientific genius whose radical theory
inspired Republican health-care policy. (Stephen Gold, Glasgow, Scotland)
Facebook: For stalking people who had previously managed to elude you.
(Craig Dykstra)
Rudy Giuliani: “Everybody’s Mayor” — that is, until he became nobody’s
presidential candidate. (Edmund Conti, Raleigh, N.C.)
Karaoke: The spectacle of people standing up and defacing the music.
(Chris Doyle, Ponder, Tex.)
Secret: Something you must share, but you don’t expect others to.
(Russell Beland)
Tequila: Leading cause of “Hey, y’all — watch this!” in 11 states.
(Craig Dykstra)
We’ve also had several other cynical-definition contests, notably two
contests headlined “Another Round of Bierce” that sought to update “The
Devil’s Dictionary,” the 1911 Ambrose Bierce classic (the whole thing is
online here ).
*The “above the fold” entries fromWeek 445
,
or Week CXII (don’t ask), in 2002: *
Lottery: A tax on poor math skills. (Id Rooney, Arlington)
Leader: One who follows loudly. (Tom Rogers, Oakton)
Potential: The measure of a person’s lack of achievement. (Eva Moore,
Ithaca, N.Y.)
Role Model: A professional athlete whose conduct rises to the level
expected of everyone else. (Chris Doyle, Burke)
Aging: Paced dying. (Barry Blyveis, Columbia)
And the winner of the genuine Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey clown
mask and nose:
Peacetime: When there are no wars anywhere you care about. (Mike Genz,
La Plata)
*And those from Week 946
in
2009: *
1. Hero: Someone who, in a crisis, exceeds our lowest expectations.
(Melissa Balmain, Rochester, N.Y.)
2. Music: Songs you listened to in college. (Kevin Dopart, Washington)
3. Grammar: The rules of language as spoken by the generation
immediately preceding one’s own. (Robert Schechter, Dix Hills, N.Y.)
4. Supercommittee: A committee designed by a committee. (Gary Crockett,
Chevy Chase, Md.)
Try not to use these same jokes, please.
*THE GREAT DIVIDES*: THE ‘HYPHEN THE TERRIBLE’ RESULTS FROM WEEK 1196*
/(*A non-inking headline idea by Dave Prevar)/
Presumably because it took a lot of time and patience to search through
the day’s paper (or the Post website) for hyphens, I received remarkably
fewer submissions forWeek 1196 than for other
recent contests (especially the very popular Week 1195 for altered movie
titles). And not surprisingly, most of the entrants were frequent
Inviters who sent long lists of entries. And so also not surprisingly,
the ink in the results wasn’t spread around as much as usual: The 37
inking portmanteau words were penned by only 18 people: Jeff Contompasis
blotted up five splashes of ink, including the winner and a runner-up;
Duncan Stevens, John Hutchins and Jesse Frankovich scored four each;
Gary Crockett got three; Cindi Rae Caron, Kevin Dopart and Mark Raffman,
two each.
JefCon is on a roll lately! After having won the Invite seven times in
his 14 years of Losing, Jeff has won the Inkin’ Memorial three more
times in the past five weeks. For No. 8, he asked me to wait until we
ran out of Lincoln statue bobbleheads (early 2017) and to send him
whatever the new trophy will be — since, he said, he didn’t know whether
he’d ever win one of those otherwise. Two weeks later, he did. Two more
weeks later, “assessin” does it again. “Wow, three of those new thingies
(whatever they may be),” Jeff marveled this afternoon. “I’ll have to
expand the underground shrine.” (We await photos.)
Duncan Stevens gets the Donald Talking Pen, which erupts in eight
different recordings of RealDonaldTrump. Quite honestly, I hope it’s the
only way Duncan ever hears that voice again. It’s the 84th (and 85th and
86th and 87th) blot of ink for Duncan, and Ink 214 (and 215) for
Lawrence McGuire, who remains the highest-scoring Loser I have never met
personally (he’s 34th on the all-time ink list
).
There were a lot of neat-sounding portmanteaux this week that cried out
for better definitions or funny examples. Among them: Twit-lit;
damnasium; melanities; kinja; confudination; slantistics. Instead of
“Esca-lying: Compounding a fib with increasing levels of
prevarications,” think how much more interesting that definition would
be with a real or imagined example of more and more ridiculous untruths.
(Perhaps for that future crowdsourcing contest I’m always talking about ...)
*POST-ELECTION LOSERMERICANA: BRUNCH/TOUR IN GETTYSBURG, NOV. 13*
I’m not going to be able to make it up to this year’s Loser brunch in
Gettysburg, Pa., with Loser hosts/tour guides Roger Dalrymple and Marty
McCullen. But especially now that it’s been moved from the hottest
summer to seasonable weather, I heartily recommend the day trip. To RSVP
and possible carpool arrangements, contact Elden Carnahan at the Losers’
website, NRARS.org (click on “Our Social Engorgements”).
----
Cross your fingers hard for Election Day, and I’ll see you next week,
assuming that The Post hasn’t been shut down. I hope that if you’ve been
as stressed out as I’ve been this season, the Invite has provided at
least something to smile about.