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 Email // Bio // Follow // 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.