Style Conversational Week 1216: Griddy language
The Style Invitational Empress on this week’s neologism contest and
results
The 20 randomly generated words used to create this grid (some are
backward and/or upside down. But many other words just showed up in
there. (Grid constructed at puzzle-maker.com)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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February 23, 2017
Today’s Style Invitational word-find neologism contest, Week 1216
, is brought to you once again with the help
of two super-helpful tools: the Random Word Generator
at
wordgenerator.net and the Instant Online Word Search Puzzle Maker
at puzzle-maker.com.
As I did in our two previous contests featuring a word-find grid, I
first went to the word generator and clicked repeatedly on “Generate
Random Words,” writing them down until I had a long enough list — this
year, 20 words — to get a word search grid that would fit nicely on the
print page of this week’s Invite. Then I fed those into the puzzle
maker, and voila — a couple of seconds later, the handy-dandy grid for
use in this contest. Of course, those words appear in straight lines
(though forward and backward), as real word search puzzles have them; I
let you snake through the grid so that you’ll have many more choices —
and there are /many. /
Fortunately, the anonymous creator of Random Word Generator provides a
definition for each word as it pops up. /Un/fortunately, I forgot to
copy them out as they appeared. But here are the words I used, with
definitions from various online sources:
Parsiism, the faith of a Zoroastrian sect in India
Hachure, or cross-hatching, the drawing technique of shading with
crossed lines
Diathermous, freely permeable by radiant heat
Incapacitation, in a prison context, is the goal of absolutely
preventing a criminal from committing more crimes, focusing on
imprisonment rather than rehabilitation, etc.
Balletic, very nimble and graceful
Darr, a European tern
Tetramorph, something incorporating four different forms; in
Christianity it often refers to an artwork featuring the Four
Evangelists depicted as various animals
.
Acidulate, to make slightly acid; if you dip apple slices in water
acidulated with lemon juice, they won’t brown as fast.
Aidless, an old word for “helpless”
Felicify, to make happy (this word seems to be entirely obsolete)
Instructorship, just the state of being an instructor, it seems
Quindecemvirate, a group of 15 people
Suffusion, the spreading of something (light, a color, etc.) across an
area. Usually it’s used as a passive verb: “The room was suffused with
sunlight.”
Rampantly, forcefully and without restraint
Ermin, an obsolete term for an Armenian
Fading
Immaculate
The Random Word Generator site also offers Fake Word Generator, Noun
Generator, Adjective Generator, Verb Generator, Word Generators for
Games, Pictionary Word Generator, Charades Generator, Sentence & Letter
Generators, Random Sentence Generator and Random Letter Generator ...
along with a slew of name generators ,
from Boat Name Generator to Elf Name Generator. Seems to me that there’s
a contest or two hiding in there somewhere. I’m happy to entertain
suggestions, especially ones with a couple of persuasive examples.
So then I took my little list to puzzle-maker.com,
an unshowy but very useful site that welcomes
teachers and anyone else to instantly construct both simple crosswords
and word search puzzles with a given list of words. It even lets you
make the accompanying list consist of clues rather than the actual
words. And it’s free, though for a whopping $3 you can get a PDF and
also be able to edit the puzzle — a price that fits even the Invite
budget. (I added the numbers and letters for the grid coordinates.)
Note that this week’s rules say you may come up with a creative
definition of an existing word, rather than to “discover” your own new
one, and that might as well include any of the words in the list above.
But still, I can predict that most of the ink will end up going to
actual neologisms, as it did in this week’s results.
PLEASE help me out and follow the directions on how to submit entries
this week. I can judge this contest sooo much faster and more fairly if
I can group all the definitions of a single word (and believe me, there
will be many with the same word, even neologisms). And the way I do that
is to first get all the entries onto one big Word file (which is a
little process in itself), and then sort them alphabetically. And of
course I need to check each potentially inking entry to make sure it
really can be traced on the grid.
This process will /not/ work for me:
— if your entry doesn’t begin with the letter-number coordinates of the
first letter of your word. That includes numbering your entries to show
me that you haven’t exceeded the maximum 25 entries (I trust you).
— if you type your definition on a separate line from the word itself:
When I click on Sort , your definition is going to break into two parts,
far away from each other. /(It’s okay if your entry runs onto a second
line; what you can’t do is push Enter in the middle of the entry.) /
I ran into those problems when judging the Week 1212 ScrabbleGrams
entries, and it took me hours to get everything in order. (I /begged /
people not to list a single scrambled rack followed by several entries
for that rack on separate lines, but did you listen to your nice little
Empy? Well, most of you did. Thanks for that.) I’m confident that I
managed to look at all the entries anyway, but I’d really like to use
this sorting method — and definitely want to get it working smoothly by
the time we have the annual foal name contest in April.
(This sorting method won’t work for poems, and isn’t necessary for it
anyway; it’s just when many people will be using the same word or
category. But lots of Invite contests are suitable: all the neologisms;
Ask Backwards; compare items on a list: Picture A, Picture B, etc., in
caption contests.)
*IT’S A JUMBLE OUT THERE: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1212*
Once again, just great results from our Week
1212 contest, in which I posted 40 “racks”
from a giant list that Loser Jeff Contompasis sent me from “The Big Book
of ScrabbleGrams”
and you got to unscramble them into the words of your choice, of at
least five of the seven letters.
Anytime I print a list of names for a contest (today’s grid will be
similar), I get lots of entries — especially using the first items in
the list — because it’s pretty easy to come up with /something. / Of
course, that doesn’t guarantee that those somethings will be /good,/ but
they almost are in neologism contests, and this week I couldn’t restrain
myself, publishing 47 entries. Even my predecessor, The Czar, who often
won’t be wowed by more than 18 or 20 entries in a given week, pronounced
these “excellent zults” (we talk via IM and use little cutesy spellings
a lot).
What kind of entry/didn’t/ make the cut? There was lots of good material
that I just didn’t think were quite as good (or were too similar to) the
47 inking entries, but as always, I also got a few of several types of
entries that I euphemistically say “don’t quite work”:
— Even a made-up word will have characteristics of a certain part of
speech, and the definition should reflect that. For instance, the “-ed”
ending of SCUMLED indicates that it’s a verb or an adjective. So
“SCUMLED: A rabble” doesn’t work because it defines the word as a noun.
Compare it with this one by Neal Starkman: SCUM-LED: doing the bidding
of a horrible person. “The members of Congress seemed SCUM-LED as they
briefly considered the constitutionality of women being chained to their
ironing boards.” (That didn’t end up with ink either, but it made my
shortlist.)
— Then there’s the no-joke entry: “GYROBIT: Drill bit that maintains an
upright position to drill a straight vertical hole.” That sounds like a
useful gadget, but remember that we are a humor contest.
— And then there’s the entry that’s so complicated and confusing that
the humor doesn’t have a chance:
CDELMSU → “MS EL CUD: Trump’s replacement beauty pageant (title) for the
pageant he divested after his post-deep-thought statement about a South
American beauty queen’s weight gain. (Cud is produced during the process
of rumination.)”
No such problems with our inking entries, topped by a quintet of veteran
Losers “above the fold”: in the top four spots: Mark Richardson’s
elegant definition of “TV pail netted him his 49th blot of ink,
including nine above the fold. Jim Lubell and Frank Mann — we’re still
waiting for his sister Aimee to sing his song parodies — both get credit
for their very similar and, well, elegant by one definition “arspoop”
entries, and I won’t even insist on cutting the Loser Mug or Grossery
Bag in half; Hall of Famer Beverley Sharp gets the civet-pooped “weasel
coffee” delicacy for the best of numerous “smartyr” entries; and William
Kennard, who wins his second Inkin’ Memorial with his double
unscrambling of CHILSTU into two ways to describe the president’s inner
circle: both HIS CULT and LIC TUSH. (William’s first winner was for a
food pun: “Steamed dumpings: Taking the farm-to-table movement way too
far.”)
Yes, there were innumerable entries about the president, Congress and
their recent actions; I don’t recall any that were very fond. It’s not
as if I’m refusing to give ink to another perspective. (Well, yeah, I
won’t give ink to a bigoted perspective.)
*What Doug dug: * Ace copy editor Doug Norwood seconded my choice for
winner (“inspired”) and especially enjoyed Jesse Frankovich’s headline
“Rack-Tile Dysfunction”; he also singled out R.I.P.shaw (Chris Doyle,
Jon Gearhart), Warren Tanabe’s “Annuit,” Bird Waring’s funny sentence
using “mannows” and Beverley’s”smartyr.”
*The Scarlet Tiles: * There were a few unpintable entries: the best was
from Frank Osen: FCKELOT: An adult-oriented musical featuring the knight
with the readiest lance: “That was no Lady in the Lake.”
And if you couldn’t figure out what actual words all the letter sets
were scrambling:
AHINRSV —> VARNISH
AHIPRSW—>WARSHIP
AIIMNNV —>MINIVAN
AILLNNO —>LANOLIN
AILOPTV —>PIVOTAL
AIMMOSS —> MIMOSAS
AINNTUY —> ANNUITY
ALLOPRY —> PAYROLL
ALLOTYY —> LOYALTY
ALOQRSU —> SQUALOR
AMNNOSW —> SNOWMAN
AMRRSTY —> MARTYRS
AOOPPRS —> APROPOS
AOORRTY —> ORATORY
BBEHINS —> NEBBISH
BBEORRY —> ROBBERY
BCEJSTU —> SUBJECT
BDELOTU —> DOUBLET
BEEHRWY —> WHEREBY
BEIOSTY —> OBESITY
BGIORTY —> BIGOTRY
BIKLNOT —> INKBLOT
BNNRSUU —> SUNBURN
CCIIRTU —> CIRCUIT
CDELMSU —> MUSCLED
CEEGLNT —> NEGLECT
CEEIJOR —> REJOICE
CEEISTU —> CUTESIE
CEELRTU —> LECTURE
CEENNOV —> CONVENE
CEFKLOT —> FETLOCK
CEIORTW —> COWRITE (that’s co-write, not cow-rite)
CEIORVY —> VICEROY
CEIOSTY —> SOCIETY
CEIRRTU —> RECRUIT
CHILSTU —> CULTISH
CHIMSSS —> SCHISMS
CHINTYZ —> CHINTZY
CHKNOOS —> SCHNOOK
CIILNUV —> UNCIVIL
CIIOSUV —> VICIOUS
*IN SO MANY WORDS ... *
Loser and Style Invitational Devotees member Dan
Helming had a thought that he shared on the Devotees page about Week
1214, the contest in which you chose words from last month’s inaugural
address and wrote something else with it: “It would be funny if one of
our AV gifted colleagues would actually digitize each word” from video
of the speech, “and then piece together one of those puzzle piece
speeches” from a winning entry. I haven’t judged this contest yet, but
on the off chance that someone out there has interest in undertaking
such a project for the price of Me Taking You Out For Ice Cream, let me
know!