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
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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.