Style Conversational Week 1222: It’s our annual paddock attack
The Style Invitational Empress on the annual horse thing and the
winning bank heads
A few of the many, many pages of entries from the 2016 contest,
extremely helpfully sorted by Loser Jonathan Hardis. (Pat Myers/The
Washington Post )
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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April 6, 2017
And ... it’s Post time. There are well over 400 3-year-old racehorses
nominated for this year’s Triple Crown races, up by about 50 from last
year, and so it was especially easy to find 100 useful names for Style
Invitational Week 1222, our 23rd annual horse
name “breeding” contest (not counting the spinoffs).
For those new to this contest — almost always the most heavily entered
of the year — or to those who are merely weirdly nostalgic, you might
want to read my Style Conversational columns from the past two years
(2016
and 2015)
to see a sampling of inking entries from past years, some guidelines on
strategy, and some nerdy stuff about how the entries are sorted.
But in a nutshell — not a Brazil nut shell but a teensy acorn, the one
with the cap covering the whole thing: First of all, this contest has
/nothing/ to do with the horses themselves; it’s all about wordplay.
That usually comes in one of two types: making a creative pun, or
modifying Horse A with Horse B to end up with Horse C.
Among my three examples this week, the first one, Horse Fly x Always
Dreaming = Pigs Fly, is the modifying type; that’s just about the only
instance when it works to repeat part of the original name in a joke.
The other two, “Gummy x Takeoff = Goo Bye!” and “Irap x Talk Logistics =
Jay Zzzzzzz,” incorporate both names, then pun on a name or expression.
The punning part is essential when your competition is thousands of
other entries; a name like, say, Scrape It Clean, while it incorporates
Gummy and Takeoff, won’t be clever enough to get ink; it’s not funny.
And, as always, a topical reference or allusion is a plus, even if
people won’t get it five years from now — and humor that actually makes
a point is even better.
Here are last year’s “above the fold” winners, the top four:
4: *Awesome Speed x Gulf Of Mexico = Don’tMethWithTexas *(Pete
Morelewicz) Funny, original pun. By the way, the slogan “Don’t Mess With
Texas” gained fame as a pun in itself: It was used on state road signs
as part of an
anti-littering campaign.
3:*Suddenbreakingnews x Twenty Four Seven = PlaneStillMissing!* (Mark
LeVota) From this Loser’s first and perhaps only Invite entry ever. This
“modification” joke juxtaposes two opposite ideas to take a dig at CNN
et al., then gives a specific topical allusion, to Malaysia Air Flight
370. The joke is even better because the reader knows just from “plane”
what we’re talking about.
2: *Big Red Rocket x Cold Blood = Wile E. Capote *(Pam Sweeney, a
frequent recidivist in the horse contests, among many others) Very cute
pun that avoids being too obvious because the first part takes a moment
to process.
And the winner of the Inkin’ Memorial:*Perfect Saint x Caribbean =
Francis of a C Sea* (Danielle Nowlin) Virtuoso pun!
--
Speaking of horse names, Loser (and foal contest specialist, and actual
horseman) Steve Price shared a story that seemed like the Onion but does
check out: In South Africa, someone named a racehorse President Trump —
two years ago, before that two-word phrase became reality — and the colt
turned out to be so “vocal, extremely stubborn, unmanageable and
arrogant,” according to his wag of a trainer, that he needed to be
gelded: “All he wanted to do was jump all the fillies.” An article about
this in South Africa’s Racing Post
went viral. And the trainer’s digs at the now-real president embarrassed
the country’s racing authority, which then decreed that the horse needed
a new name. It knew enough about American politics to reject the first
suggestion, “Potus.”
The chestnut gelding is now named Fake News.
*DON’T FORGET TO FLUSH — SAVE THE DATE: THE FLUSHIES, JUNE 17 *
Actual too-insidey entry for Week 1218:
Real headline: Mixture of antiques and contemporary pieces decorate Md. home
Bank head by Roy Ashley: Veterans, First Offenders offenders gather in
Lothian, Md., for Style Invitational Flushies
Yes, for the second straight year, the Greater Loser Community will hold
the Flushies, its annual awards banquet (i.e., a potluck lunch), at RK
Acres, the home and 10-acre farm of Loser Robin Diallo and hub Khalil in
Lothian, south of Annapolis. Even though it rained last year, by the end
of the afternoon we could leave the Diallos’ very coolly furnished house
(chairs made out of animal horns) and wander back to the barn and visit
the horses, llama, goats, chickens, even peacocks — so it’s the rare
Loser event that might not bore your tykes to death.
Even without the fauna, there’s always a lot of fun to be had for both
the veteran Losers and newbies, and even just non-entering fans; anyone
who’s not actively oozing sores can attend. Some people come in from out
of town and make a D.C/Baltimore sightseeing weekend of it. Plaques are
awarded to the Loser of the Year, Rookie of the Year, Most Imporved
[sic] etc., and rolls of personalized toilet paper will be tossed out to
those who reached their 50th blots of ink, their 100th, etc. (And I
might just give away some prizes that were too tasteless for the Invite
itself.) And there’s always The Doing Of The Song Parodies, at least one
of them written for the occasion. (Here’s hoping that Nan Reiner will be
able to make it up from Florida to lead the singing.)
The Flushies are a production of the Losers themselves, not The Post,
though I’m there every year and help get the word out. Now that the
Invitational email list has grown to 10,000 people, I no longer send the
invitation that way; I’ll probably do it through Evite, which worked
pretty well for the Loser Post-Holiday Party in January. If you want to
make sure you’re invited, email me at pat.myers@washpost.com and I’ll
make sure you’re on the list.
One disappointment: Robin herself won’t be there — a State Department
diplomat, she’ll be stationed in Baghdad during that time, leaving
Khalil (hey, it was /his / idea!) to play host to the Losers. But with
luck, we can Skype.
*BANKY-PANKY*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1218*
/*Non-inking headline by Jesse Frankovich/
Dang, this contest always cracks me up. I pulled the 37 bank headlines
in this week’s results of Week 1218
from a “shortlist” of some 120 entries, so if yours didn’t get ink, it
was surely one of those 83 others, right? I heard from a number of
non-subscribing Losers who found themselves blocked by The Post’s
paywall, since they’d read their monthly quota of 10 free articles, and
so I’m glad I allowed headlines from any publication from the dates of
the contest. (Most of the entries still came from The Post, not that I
cared.)
I’ve found that the best headlines to use for this contest are ones
whose real meanings you understand without explanation: When you see
“Cuba Advances, Will Face Israel Next,” I assume you’ll know right away
that’s a headline about a sports tournament, and that “Purple Line”
refers to some transit route. On the other hand, I got several entries
like “Planning Commission Defers Action on Sunrise”/ Innovative “Rise in
West” Idea Tabled For Now”; I didn’t want to add (“chain of
assisted-living communities”) to explain. Ditto with several headlines
about “Wall”; it wasn’t clear that the heads were really about Wizards
player John Wall, and that probably wouldn’t occur to readers outside
the D.C. area.
This year I let people use either “upstyle” headlines (with capitals)
even if the original was in downstyle, to allow for entries like the two
inking heads about Turkey, with different angles:
Flynn Was Paid to Represent Turkey During Campaign
/President signs executive order banning Thanksgiving /(Steve Price)
As a New Relationship Is Tested, Turkey Keeps High Hopes for Trump
/Spicer still defending boss’s erratic behavior /(Jon Gearhart)
In this week’s results, I usually used downstyle just for readability,
if it didn’t matter to the joke. Still, there was the occasional
headline that wouldn’t work in either format: “Witness quizzed on
shooter’s ID / “Psych expert said ego not a factor.” Unless the headline
were in /all/ caps (no way, sorry), you can’t read “ID” to mean “id.”
It’s the second win and sixth visit to the Losers’ Circle for Ellen
Ryan, out of 37 blots of ink — a highly impressive Other Junk-to-Magnet
ratio. (If someone writes in to complain of the use of “libtard,” I give
up.) Meanwhile, He Who Cannot Be Stopped Jesse Frankovich wins the fake
smashing-golf-ball with what I suppose is the shortest Style
Invitational (or anyone else’s) entry ever. Hildy Zampella scores with
nifty “seeds” wordplay, and Jeff Hazle highlights the humor potential of
the phrase “bag of dirt.”
*What Doug Dug:* The faves this week of Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood
were Steve Price’s “Thanksgiving,” Dave Matuskey’s wry “Wasting away
again in Mar-a-Lago-ville,” William Kennard on “Fox’s rabies test” (my
favorite of several similar entries) and Chris Doyle’s play on “Eight OTs.”
*Off with their heads: The unprintables*
Several of these were wisely designated “Convo only.”
A Modest Blow for Fiscal Responsibility / Brothel’s ‘economy plan’
offers 1-minute ‘kiss’ to cash-strapped johns (Duncan Stevens)
U.S. likely to send as many as 1,000 more ground troops to Syria /
Cannibals had requested new shipment (Nan Reiner)
Wall finally starts to feel the love/ Toilet stall in local bar acquires
glory hole (Jeff Contompasis)
Champs Go Down / Women reveal, in detail, what it takes to win their
hearts (Tom Witte)
Okay, get breeding, folks.