Style Conversational Week 1219: Tumbl-dry humor with ‘lik’ poems They started with a cow, but the poetry meme works for divers personages (Courtesy of the Morgan Library & Museum/Folger Shakespeare Library) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // March 16, 2017 /I am a pome, my lynes are four Iambic verse to scan and score AA BB, wryt thattè doun And then at last, I verb the noun/ Those directions for the poems we’re seeking in Style Invitational Week 1219 are brought to you by Imperial Scion and Thing Two Valerie Holt, who has a blog on Tumblr called English History Is a Trip, Man. I hardly Tumbl, myself (Facebook is already taking up pathetic amounts of my day), but Valerie recently shared with me the current, perhaps ephemeral mini-craze of the “lik the bred” verse, imported from another platform I never look at, Reddit. Inspired, like many other bloggers, by that poem about a tongue-happy cow that we use as this week’s example, Valerie has been likking the bred about various historical Brits: Henry VIII and his fifth wife, the ill-fated Catherine Howard: I am a kyng Now I arryv At royall weding Number fyv But summewones shaggd My newlywed I blaym the girl I chop the hed Musing on a photo of Winston Churchill scowling at the beach in his bathing suit: My naym is Church We ar at warr The Germans come To tayk ar shorr To stir the troops I mayk a speche I saye it wrong I fyte the beche --- The “lik the bred” genre derives some of its winsomeness from the fake Middle English spellings, but I’ve found that a little of it goes a long way. And we have half a page of The Washington Post to fill here. So I think the set of Invitational results will be most enjoyable if I run some poems in real spelling along with some in the cutesy. Feel free to submit them both ways; I might also choose to “translate” one to the other. Do make sure that your fake writing is at least phonetic: “fyte” reads like “fight,” but “fyt” could be read as “fit.” — Note that I’ll probably run these poems as four lines rather than eight (Redditors, please unbunch thy breeches) to conserve space on the page; hence Valerie’s directions. But either way, we want 32 syllables. There’s a shade of difference between the eight-liner’s iambic dimeter (ba-DUMP ba-DUMP; ba-DUMP ba-DUMP) and the quatrain’s tetrameter (ba-DUMP ba-DUMP ba-DUMP ba-DUMP) but I think each format will work well enough in the other. Either way, this form cries out for strong accents — big DUMPS, as it were. — Also, even with the “old” spelling, feel free to add capitalization, punctuation, etc. I’ll honor the poetical affectations more than usual, but remember, people won’t enjoy your humor if they don’t want to bother decoding it. — You may precede the poem with a title. — “In the news lately” is intentionally vague. I’ll be pretty flexible. But not Churchill or Henry VIII or My Friend Joe. — The identification in the first line doesn’t have to be “My name is ...”; you could do “I’m ...,” “As XXX,” etc. And as a four-line poem, you could do not just “My name is Trump” but also, say, “My name is Donald and I think ...” We’ll see how it goes. Here are some current-events versions ; I have faith in our Loserbards to best them. *GOOD TO THE LAST DORK*: OUR LATEST LOSER MUG* /*Kevin Dopart’s runner-up mug slogan from Week 715, 2007/ I just heard from Week 1213 punku runner-up Seth Tucker that the “This Is Your Brain on Mugs” mug he won arrived with the handle broken off. So I’ll be sending Seth the very last Loser Mug I have, just in time (or almost) for the arrival of Loser Mug 4.0 for our third- and fourth-place finishers: “You Gotta Play to Lose.” The picture in this week’s Invite is Bob Staake’s Photoshop mockup — the mugs will arrive here at the Empress’s palace, Mount Vermin, in as little as a week — but it should look pretty much like the real thing: We’re back to a tall 15-ounce mug, after switching to an 11-ouncer for our last model, the LOVE-turned-LOSER . I ordered 100 mugs, so I’m counting on the Invite’s continued existence for the next year or two, or else I’ll have to host one big coffee klatch. In any case, think of the mug as a limited-edition Bob Staake reproduction (maybe I should artsily mark them 1/100, 2/100, etc., on the bottom). The slogan is by Roy Ashley, from back in Week 715 , a contest that sought slogans for both the next Loser T-shirt and the first mug. Many of those slogans went on to appear on Loser magnets over the years, including Tom Witte’s “No Childishness Left Behind,” one of the two I’m sending out right now. And I’ve often employed Roy’s slogan as a retort to seldom-entering contestants who grouse about their lack of ink: “Hey, you gotta play to lose.” (Mug 3.0, “My Cup Punneth Over,” was from a later mug-slogan contest and credited to three separate Losers: Mike Gips, Edmund Conti and Howard Walderman.) No. 1 of the new mug series will go to Bob, No. 2 (but of course) to the Empress, No. 3 to Roy. And assuming they’d like the new swag, Nos. 4 and 5 will go to this week’s third- and fourth-place Losers, Chris Doyle and Duncan Stevens. Remember, though, that runners-up also have the option of the spacious Grossery Bag, “I Got a B in Punmanship” — also an Edition-of-100 Staake print. And whenever it’s feasible, I’d like to deliver the mug by hand. (See “Seth Tucker.”) *OUR SO-CALLED LAUGH*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1215* /*Non-inking headline by Jesse Frankovich/ HOW GOOD WERE THEY? They were so good ... that one of the wittiest Style Invitational Devotees , Alex Blackwood, wrote me this morning to say she thought “nothing snuck in” — that every entry in this week’s results deserved to be there. When I responded that “they were the wheat plucked from lots of chaff,” she said: “Just enough wheat to make it look like you had nothing but.” And Alex doesn’t even enter the contest — no motive to suck up to the Empress! The hoary “X is so Y” format is the basis for numerous subgenres, including Chuck Norris toughness jokes (Chris Doyle gets ink this week with “his shower stall is strewn with Legos”) and of course Your Mama jokes, which Kevin Dopart used as a meta-entry: She’s been used so much that even this contest doesn’t want to touch her. But once again, in a phenomenon that’s continued for many months, a huge fraction of the entries concerned the federal government, especially the guy at the top; the 15 of this week’s 34 inking entries that /aren’t / about national politics are probably disproportionate. Just as with last week’s top winners, the top four “above the fold” entries comprised three political, one non-: The latter was Chris Doyle’s great pun about competitive dieting: “she always halves what I’m halving.” The other three: Duncan Stevens’s “Putin bedroom” in the White House; Brian Allgar’s jab about the president’s grabbing effectiveness (yes, I edited out “pussies” from Brian’s entry, but you knew exactly what he was getting at, right?); and Jeff Shirley’s winning dig at the (choose your own adjective) House Speaker Paul Ryan. *What Doug Dug:* Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood agreed with my choice of winner, and also singled out Chris’s “halves”; Frank Osen’s take on the “missing” Richard Simmons ; Duncan’s scornful joke about John McCain the maverick; Dan Helming’s absurdist joke Democrat House members having to write their congressmen; and Kevin’s Your Mama. And of course — he’s a copy editor — Jeff Contompasis’s expertly crafted joke about stylebooks’ prohibition of the phrase “comprised of” — “I was already typing the note” to point out the error ... “before I read the rest of the sentence.” *So, So ... No: The Unprintables: * Two that couldn’t make the Invite even with tweaking: President Trump loves Russian garbanzo beans so much that he had a chickpea in a Moscow hotel. (Peter Jenkins) And ... Trump’s hands are so small that the official state dinner toast is “Boner petite!” (Chris Doyle) *Next Loser Sighting: This Sunday, College Park(ish)* Loser Brunch No. 195 (!!!) is at noon on Sunday, March 19, at the Moose Creek Lodge; it’s inside the Holiday Inn right at the College Park (U.S. 1) Beltway exit, next door to Ikea. I don’t think I can make it this weekend, but I’ve been to Loser brunches there several times, spending many trips to the buffet line. RSVP to Elden Carnahan at the Losers’ website, NRARS.org . As always, everyone is invited.