Style Conversational Week 1212: The Post still has the ’Gram family The Style Invitational Empress discusses this week’s new contest and results To print out this list for use in Style Invitational Week 1212, right-click on the list, then "Open image in new tab"; then on that tab, you can print the list. (Letter sets from "The Big Book of ScrabbleGrams," Sterling, 2005) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // Style Invitational editor January 26, 2017 I’ll sometimes do the ScrabbleGrams puzzle when I’m looking at The Post’s weekday comics pages, but I find it the /perfect/ thing for my weekly 10-minute subway ride to the Post newsroom, when I see it (in large print) in The Express, The Post’s free tabloid: Since you really don’t need to write anything down, I can work to unscramble the day’s four words even while I’m standing up in the train and holding on to a pole. It’s surprisingly challenging, though; while sometimes all four words will jump out at me within seconds, other times it takes me the whole ride — or I can’t figure out one or more of them at all. Except for the seven-letter sets it uses, the game (see a sample below left) has nothing to do with our yearly Tile Invitational contest — this year, Week 1212. But it originated in 2013 as the idea of Ultra-Loser Jeff Contompasis, who does the Grams every day and regularly posts in the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook group his discovery of some word that was “forgotten” by the game’s designers: Just last week, for example, Jeff noted: “Scrabble Grams went into the naughty file on January 19 ... AAENMMT -> MANMEAT: Do I even need to define it?” And in what’s become the drill, other Devotees chimed in with their own discoveries: Barbara Turner offered MAMANET, all the blogs about being a mom. AND TAMEMAN, one who uses the hamper and puts the toilet seat back down. Brendan Beary: MEANTAM: Waal awl t’other stuff’s goan awn. Doug Frank: MANEMAT -- Caused by skipping the creme rinse. (You mean you’re still not one of the Style Invitational Devotees? Sign up at on.fb.me/invdev and the other Devs will anagram your name every which way. The group, by the way, is classified as “secret” on Facebook, which means that nobody outside the group can see anything you post there.) As the example above shows, part of the fun of this contest is to show lots of permutations of the same set (something I’ll be sure to do four weeks from now; it’s one reason we’re using just 40 racks rather than the 100 we had the first time). I’d even toyed with /requiring / a set of three different rearrangements per entry; I nixed that, though, remembering a similar demand in an earlier contest in which I’d get one fabulous neologism and two blah ones, thus making the great one unusable. (That would be Week 530, “Tri Harder.”Results here .) Sitcom star Alan Young with Mr. Ed in 1962. Ed (né Bamboo Harvester) died in 1970, but Willllburrrr stuck around until 2016. (ASSOCIATED PRESS) The set lists for all four contests were compiled by Jeff himself from his “Big Book of ScrabbleGrams”; he sent me a spreadsheet years ago with hundreds of these things, and I just select a few dozen each time. I believe that all the racks this week contain a seven-letter solution of a real word; a ScrabbleGrams puzzle almost always has one rack that yields only a six-letter word. So after you “fill your dance card” with the maximum 25 entries, you can go through all the letter sets and figure out the actual solutions. Another Scrabble-connected neologism contest we’ve done: last year’s challenge to create new terms whose letters added to exactly 13 Scrabble points. We could do that one again, with a different letter total — maybe a very small one? For further inspiration, here are the results of the three previous ScrabbleGrams contests: Week 1021, ’Gram Theft (scroll down past the week’s new contest): Winner: AUFWRGF: Gruffaw: A mocking, dismissive laugh. “Listen, kid, if you can’t take the constant gruffaws, you’ll never make it big in the mime biz.” (Frank Osen, Pasadena, Calif) Week 1068, The Tile Invitational: Winner: AAURGJN → Uganja: Country ruled by the surprisingly mellow dictator Weedy Amin. (Brendan Beary, Great Mills, Md.) Week 1123, The Tile Invitational III : Winner: EFFILRY→ Filefry: Somehow, Hillary’s phone got infected by this bug. (Ricardo Rodriguez, Springfield, Va., a First Offender) ... who just got his second ink with last week’s crossword clues *ZING OUT YOUR DEAD*: THE OBIT POEMS OF WEEK 1208* /*A non-inking headline by Tom Witte/ 2016 might be remembered as a particularly busy year for the Grim Reaper’s Deputy for Entertainment Casualties, but as often in our annual obit-poem contest, many of the wittiest and most interesting entries concerned people who showed up farther down the list of Notable Deaths of the Year. Perhaps, as this week’s winner, Melissa Balmain, put it: “I think it’s harder to write something funny about people whose work you genuinely knew and loved.” The ScrabbleGrams puzzle in the Jan. 21 Post. We're not playing the game; we're just using its "racks." (Not this one!) That leads me to think, then, that Melissa doesn’t have any Ikea Billy bookcases, since her wit certainly wasn’t squelched when she figured that the coffin of designer Gillis Lundgren “was still missing half its screws.” Melissa, a major light-verse poet who’s the co-editor of the journal Light and a perennial Loserbard, also got ink this week with her celebrations of the woman who invented the beehive hairdo as well as a triple-obit in the form of a joke in the form of two limericks about the designers of powerboats, the 747 and the Volvo station wagon, along with her (oy!) ninth Inkin’ Memorial trophy. (Melissa is opting for just magnets now, which means that our supply of the final Inkin’ Memorial will last a little longer.) On the other hand, I received about 30 different odes to Carrie Fisher, two of which get ink today. Nan Reiner — who can use this week’s Invite as a mini-anthology, with five inking poems, gets the second-prize piece of Berlin Wall gravel, while Beverley Sharp will have to settle for the “Magnum Dopus” magnet (the magnet slogan was her own idea, at least). The rules said that the Empress was asking for a poem “someone who died in 2016”, Cleveland’s 52-year drought of pro sports championships — finally broken by the NBA’s Cavaliers — isn’t exactly “someone,” but how could I toss Matt Monitto’s clever idea and smart execution? And utility man Jesse Frankovich once again shows he can play any position in the Invite game, finishing “above the fold” for the third straight week, in disparate contests. *What Doug dug: * Ace copy editor Doug Norwood, who reads the Invite and finds my screwups in the print edition before it goes to press (almost all the errors you see online are from my own late adds for the post.com version), liked all four winners this week, and also singled out Mark Raffman’s ode to Alan Young (my favorite among several with the same “of course, of course” idea); Duncan Stevens’s poem about the irascible Antonin Scalia; and Beverley Sharp’s for the inventor of the Big Mac (to say that fast food killed him, at age 98, would be, admitted Beverley, “a whopper”). *NEXT LOSER SIGHTING: BRUNCH IN ARLINGTON, FEB. 19 * If you missed the Loser Post-Holiday Party — or if you went but would like to chat in a less crowded atmosphere — join me and whoever else in the Loser Community is up for it at the Heavy Seas Alehouse, a brewpub in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Va. Sunday, Feb. 19, at noon; RSVP to Elden Carnahan on the Losers’ website at nrars.org (Click on “Our Social Engorgements”).