Style Conversational: We started at the bottom, now we’re here 24 years, 1,218 contests later, there’s no wits’ end to The Style Invitational From Page F2 of The Post's Sunday Style section, March 7, 1993. Bob Staake took over as cartoonist the next year. Happy 24th birthday, Invite! (Illustrations by Marc Rosenthal for The Washington Post) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // March 9, 2017 This weekend’s Washington Post Magazine contains an editor’s note that’s produced a wave of disappointment from thousands of readers: The Mag has dropped both its annual Peeps diorama contest after 10 years, and its 10th running of the Post Hunt as well. Deputy Editor David Rowell said the volume of Peeps entries and readership had both declined, and that The Post couldn’t arrange for enough sponsorship for this year’s Hunt, an enormous, complex, costly event. Washington City Paper, in reaction, says it’ll do a Peeps contest. Hopefully the Hunt will be back next year. Meanwhile, today we bring you Week 1218 of The Style Invitational. On Tuesday the Invite celebrated its 24th birthday. Nobody’s told me, yet, to stop putting it out. So let’s go. *HOW TO ‘MESS WITH OUR HEADS’* Our “bank head” contest is one of the most frequent over the history of the Invitational, at least in the Empress Era (2004-?), and it’s been pretty much the same drill despite a few small variations. For Week 1218 we’ll use the same rules as we did six months ago, in Week 1191, with an exception noted below: *The headline you cite: * In the print paper, you may use an article’s main headline; the story’s actual bank head; or the jump head (the headline on the story’s second page). Online, you may use not only a headline above an article, but also headlines that serve just as links to the article. And for both, you may use headlines in ads. *Do I have to use every word in the headline?* No (though it might be a clever feat sometimes if you do). But it has to be a significant part of the headline, for example the words before or after a colon. You can’t use such a short snippet that the meaning is changed even before you add the bank head: If the hed (journo jargon) is “D.C. Teacher Passes Out Porn Instead of Math Worksheet,” you can’t say the headline is “D.C. Teacher Passes Out.” Also, you can’t drop words in the middle of the headline; it has to be the actual block of words. *Can I change the capitalization or punctuation in the headline? * I’ve gone back and forth on this, since reading a common noun as a name, and vice versa, can be really useful for wordplay. For many years The Post had “upstyle” headlines, with all the main words capitalized, as in a book title; the New York Times still does. So does The Onion , which of course is spoofing old-fashioned newspaper cliches. But most newspapers now use the “downstyle” format, which is essential for The Post now that so many of its headlines read as full conversational sentences. *Okay, this is new this time:* I just decided that you may interpret a lowercase word as a proper noun — say “accord” as Accord, the Honda car. Or vice versa. But go ahead and make the whole headline upstyle, in both cases. Don’t change the punctuation. *Can I use headings on other online stuff besides newspapers? * You can if it has a date on it and it falls within the required window, March 9-20. Very helpful to me: Copy the URL (website address) and put it underneath your entry. DO NOT EMBED IT into the headline itself; I’ll see a bunch of garble. *Is there even/more/ blather I can read to guide and inspire me?* Excellent question! Yes, there is. There’s even a comically bad graphic.You can read my Week 1141 Style Conversational column . *ELOCUTION FRAUD*: THE RESULTS OF THE ALTERNAUGURAL-ADDRESS CONTEST * /*Non-inking headline by Tom Witte/ I just hope we don’t become the subject of a presidential tweetstorm. I was totally confident that the Week 1214 contest, to rearrange some words from the new president’s inaugural address to write something else, would produce enough good material — amazing material; our past “word bank” contests had never failed us. But I figured that it’d be the Invite Obsessives who’d bring home all the ink; who else besides the crazies who fret about their rank in the year’s Loser Standings would spend all day compiling long sentences from all over the 1,400-some-word speech, and ensuring that a certain word didn’t appear more often than in the original. But a number of brand-new and infrequent Losers gave it a go, often with impressive results. I can’t begin to share all the inkworthy material this week (for one thing, many of them were somewhat similar); if you didn’t get ink, well, we don’t call it the Loser Community for nothing. I didn’t specifically request it — I asked for “a humorous passage — a ‘quote,’ an observation, a joke, a dialogue, a poem, anything” — but the majority of entries were “quotes” from some alt-inaugural address. Three of the four “above-the-fold” winners this week were of this genre. Someone suggested in theStyle Invitational Devotees Facebook group that it’d be cool if we took some entries and juxtaposed video snippets of Trump actually saying each of those words, so we could have him “saying” the entries. I said sure, if someone wanted to volunteer for such an arduous task. And wouldn’t you know it, onetime Invite Rookie of the Year Todd DeLap wrote me and said, “I’m an amateur, but I’ll give it a try.” So I sent him one of the shortest entries, and ta-da,here’s nine seconds of the brand-new president “saying” this line by Kevin Mettinger: “I do not want this job. Bring back President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama right now.” Ye Usual Suspects — Frank Osen, Mark Raffman, John Hutchins — occupy three of the four spots in this week’s Losers’ Circle, but second place goes to First Offender Elaine Lederman, who exaggerated the sparseness of the Inauguration Day crowd by only several hundred thousand people, having the new president worry if he’d shown up on the wrong day. Elaine will be getting a Fir Stink for her first ink along with the fabulous second-prize turtle figurine made of manure, so I hope she’ll be entering a lot more and will pick up some real Bob Staake creations (magnets, the Grossery Bag, and the Loser Mug). [*Thursday evening update:* Elaine messaged me to note that she’s not a First Offender after all: She had gotten ink one other time — in 1994, when she was fifth runner-up in Week 81. For some reason, she’d never made it into the Loser Stats.] *The Tender Kress:* Filling in for the vacationing Doug Norwood, copy editor Steve Kress says he “loved the misdirection and dry wit of [John Hutchins’s] 4th-place entry. I’ll be ‘just and reasonable’ for folks on all different kinds of right, and folks who want to transition to the right. Hah!” Steve also liked Mae Scanlan’s honorable mention, “with the very Trumpian idea of transferring all other countries to space.” *A YUGE SUCCESS: THE 700-WORD ENTRY* I hope you not just marveled at, but actually read the amazing entry by Mike Burch that I published at the bottom of this week’s Invitational — because it’s not just a jaw-dropping feat to take half the words from Trump’s speech and write something else, but it’s also some excellent, mordant writing. And this is only Mike’s second blot of Invite ink — the first was in 2012! I asked Mike how he managed to compose something of that length — and yes, it was totally valid, with no ineligible words, or words used too frequently. Here’s his method: “I cut-and-pasted the original speech into my word processor” and then “moved each word as I used it from the ‘unused’ word list into my ‘more accurate’ speech. So if I wanted to expand on my version, I could do so, because I still know all the words that have not been used. ... “Another trick I used to save time was copying entire sentences and changing them slightly to reveal the ‘real’ meaning. For instance, the long list of terrible things Trump purported to save us from became the list of things he /intends /to do. This speeds up the rate of ‘shrinkage.’ [Actually, a lot of people took that tack, just negating what Trump said; this approach didn’t tend to get ink.] “I own a computer software company and have been developing software for more than forty years, so I am something of an expert on using technology to save time.” Well, then, Mike — let’s start using that saved time to enter the Invitational every week, okay? /(Unprintable entries are at the bottom of this column. They’re exceedingly juvenile and crude, so if you’re not, just skip the last section, okay?) / *SAVE THE DATE: FLUSHIES AT THE FARM, JUNE 17* Given that we no longer have to try for the same weekend as the Post Hunt, the organizers of the Flushies have settled on Saturday, June 17, as the best date for the Losers’ own annual awards banquet (a.k.a. potluck lunch). For the second year straight, we’ll be gathering at the 10-acre farmlet of Loser Robyn Diallo and her husband, Khalil, south of Annapolis in Lothian, Md., about 30 miles east of Washington. This year it won’t rain, either! There are lots of farm animals, some of them pettable: horses, goats, chickens, even peacocks strutting their stuff around the barnyard. The only problem is that Robyn herself can’t join us: She’ll be stationed in Iraq with the State Department. But Khalil wants us anyway! We hope to set up some Skype arrangement. Details to follow closer to the date, but everyone is welcome to join us — you don’t have to be a frequent Loser. Bring the kids! * * *RESPECT FOR THE OFFICE... * Given that the current occupant doesn’t show much respect for it himself, I don’t feel guilty about all the blissful and unabated mockery of the president of the United States in this week’s results. But even I couldn’t bring myself to print in the Invitational any of the clever and coffee-spittingly funny entries based on the combination of “movement” and “flush.” Fortunately, we have the Conversational, which could charitably be called “a niche column” and less charitably called “read by nobody.” I received several entries along this line; representing the entire genre today is this one by — wow, I just checked: our almost-newbie, Elaine Lederman! /This movement is great! Not just great – magnificent! A beautiful, wonderful brown. And so big! Even bigger than Obama did! Get a ruler! You have never seen anything longer!/ /Now it is time for a glorious flush!/ /Great. It is not going down because of the solidarity of it. The system is starting to fill up! The infrastructure is struggling with the large mountain of decay! / /Thank you, Obama!/ It wasn’t just poop jokes that were unprintable. Kevin Mettinger, whose inking entry got the video, sent in: “I let foreign women we we on my face.”(NO VIDEO.) We are just so, so nasty. But I don’t feel very sad, at least while I’m reading this week’s Invite.