Style Conversational Week 1205: The year in redo The Style Invitational Empress discusses the week’s new contest and results By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // December 8, 2016 I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that I will receive more inkworthy entries than I can use in Week 1205 of The Style Invitational — and in Week 1206 as well. It’s a sequoia limb: How could there not be an inkucopia, given the more than 50 widely varied contests you have a chance to enter — if you missed them the first time around, if you’ve thought of something new, or even if you’re convinced that the Empress will finally recognize the greatness of the entry she overlooked before. Over the past year, I think, we’ve covered all the annual (or more frequent) favorites: Obit poems. Foal names. Limericks. Song parodies. Bank heads. Word banks. Cartoon captions. Two items from a list. ScrabbleGrams. Tour de Fours. Fictoids. Questionable Journalism. Plus a number of contests we’ve done only a few times in the past 24 years, like collective nouns, ink blots, Poeds. And some novel one-off contests, like What3Words locations, Questions for Terrible People, and “Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me” questions. I didn’t need to put in links to all those contests in the previous paragraphs because you can more easily see them all on one page — thanks to Loser 4 Ever Elden Carnahan and hisMaster Contest List on the Loser Community’s own website, *NRARS.org. * I didn’t mention this explicitly in the Invite itself, but if you don’t subscribe to The Post, and you can’t sign up for a free subscription through an .edu, mil or.gov email , you can see all the year’s contests on the Master Contest List and they won’t count against the limit of Post articles you can read free. That’s because they’re PDFs of the print and Web pages, as well as plain-text versions. Also, the tabular form of the list lets you quickly scan the descriptions of all the year’s contests. To see the contests on Elden’s list, scroll way down to the past year of contests, then click on one of the icons at the right of each listing: The notepad is plain text, the WP is a PDF of the print column, and the E is a PDF of the online version, which often contains more entries than the print paper. And don’t forget to check the results of the contest you’re entering; just scroll down four more week and click on that link. Both this week and next, you’ll be able to choose from the whole year’s contests; I’m essentially running the contest twice, with two sets of winners (next week’s will be called Week 1206). So you get to write as many as 50 entries, as long as you don’t submit more than 25 in each week. Your entries could be from all different contests, or all from a single week. Note: If you don’t give me the week number of the contest you’re entering, you’re counting on my willingness to figure out which one it is; my nice-Empressness can vary during the judging process. As always, you may resubmit entries that didn’t get ink the first time around, as long as someone else didn’t get ink with a different version of your joke. I often don’t have enough room on a given week to honor all the inkworthy song parodies, limericks and other long-form entries, or entries from hugely popular contests, and so it’s quite possible — it’s happened numerous times — that a song or poem or horse name that was robbed of ink last time can even end up “above the fold” as one of the top winners. *YOU — YES, EVEN YOU — ARE INVITED TO THE LOSER POST HOLIDAY PARTY, JAN. 14* In last week’s Style Conversational I announced the happy news that for the first time, our Loser Post-Holiday Party would be within walking distance from the Metro: at Steve Langer’s house in Chevy Chase, Md. And we’ve already heard from a couple of dozen people that they’ll be coming to the annual potluck/parody-fest. Within the next few days, I’ll send out an email invitation to a list I’ll compile of Losers who’ve gotten ink lately and live in the D.C.-Baltimore area, along with others who I think might like to come. The method carries a significant risk that I’ll neglect to mention /you,/ even though you’d like to bring your favorite eaty/drinky thing and join us, so I’d be delighted if you’d write me at pat.myers@washpost.com with an RSVP, even if you’re not quite sure you can make it. After we compile a guest list, I’ll send you the precise house number, etc. If you’re entirely new to the Loser Community, I’ll chat a bit with you by email. We’re not trying to be exclusive, but the invitation list we’ve used in past years — everyone who gets The Post’s weekly email newsletter when the new Invitational goes up — has grown to more than 9,000 people. I’m sure the Langer-Fultz Abode is all very nice, but I don’t think it offers stadium seating. *This week’s nON-EVent*: The results of Week 1201* /*Non-inking headline idea by Kevin Dopart/ The letter block NOVE, in honor of November, proved as successful as its predecessors in our annual Tour de Fours neologism contest. Of 24 possible arrangements of the four letters — you could separate them with a space, hyphen, etc., but not with another letter — this week’s inking entries feature 14 of them, and at least 20 of them were used in all (it’s possible that someone breaking the block might even have used EOVN, HVOE, OEVN or VNEO, though it didn’t show up on my search). This contest was posted just days after the Nov. 8 election (it had been prepared beforehand), and a lot of the entries — a smaller number than usual in total — reflected shock, confusion, bitterness and fear. Of course, a lot of other entries reflected toilets and boogers. It’s how we roll. All four spots in the Losers’ Circle this week are filled with Usual Suspects; it’s nice to see Jeff Shirley back Losing again after some nasty medical stuff. With his third Inkin’ Memorial, Duncan Stevens inches ever closer to the 100-ink mark, almost all in the last couple of years. Jeff has 139 blots of ink, including a whopping 20 “above the fold,” but less whopping than the 247 inks/ 25 ATF of Danielle Nowlin and the whoptastic 1,416/128 of Tom Witte, who has entered the Invitational virtually (or maybe without qualification) every week since Week 7 in 1993. *Laugh out of Courtney* and *What Doug dug: * The favorites this week from the copy-editing tag team: Courtney Rukan singled out as “all really clever” Chris Doyle’s Intravenous de Milo, L’oven Spoonful (Cindi Rae Caron), Un-evolve (Mae Scanlan), Neo-vent (Tom Witte), Beano Evil (Doyle again) and Pornoverse (Jesse Frankovich). Doug Norwood also favored Nov-ember (Andy Promisel), Supine ova (Jon Gearhart) and Beano Evil (yet more from the Doylester). This clever entry was too inside-baseball for the Invitational: Neovite: Someone eager to experience the Royal Pine of Losing. (Kevin Dopart). See, the FirStink , the Little Trees brand car air freshener with a sticker on it that’s the prize for Style Invitational First Offenders, is always in the variety called Royal Pine. *cONVErsational only*: This week’s unprintables* /*another Jeff Contompasis idea/ As usual with our neologism contests, some entries were too crude even for the Invitational. Such as (I’m looking up their offers as I include them here): Bone voyage: “Hope you get laid on your vacation.” (Mark Raffman) Womenov: I’ve been pursuing this goal unsuccessfully for decades, but I still vow that someday I will get Womenov! (Tom Witte) No-no vent: “I said that’s an exit, not an entrance!” (Tom Witte, who is renowned for unprintable wordplay) Lovenog: Semen. (Well, guess who.) *LOSER BRUNCH THIS SUNDAY: TED’S BULLETIN, GAITHERSBURG, MD. * I’ll be singing in a choral concert Sunday afternoon on the other side of town, so I have to miss this month’s Loser brunch. But especially if you live in the I-270 corridor, you ought to RSVP to Elden and join the contingent at Ted’s Bulletin , the Montgomery County branch of the popular Capitol Hill diner.