Style Conversational Week 1224: Giving a hand to the ultra-pedantic
The Empress still can’t get over that no one complained about this
cartoon
Bob Staake made Nixon literally sinister for the Week 1221 cartoon. And
not a single Free for All complaint — or even a Week 1220 entry about
it. (Bob Staake/for The Washington Post )
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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April 20, 2017
I didn’t just predict that someone would immediately complain that Bob
Staake had taken artistic license to draw President Nixon as left-handed
in the Week 1221 cartoon (full picturehere ).
I wanted him to change it. The moment Bob emailed me his sketch of Nixon
and Miss Manners (their child would keep a “whom not to invite” list), I
replied that it was great, but “make Nixon right-handed, though — he
wasn’t on MY team” (I am of the southpawian persuasion). Bob assumed I
was joking — how could I possibly be so pedantic? — and sure enough, in
the final cartoon Nixon remains stubbornly sinistral as well as
sinister. (Miss Manners is also depicted as left-handed, but she’s not a
major historical figure.)
I still wasn’t happy, but it just so happened that theprevious week’s
Style Invitational contest — which would still
be running for another five days — was to make comically pedantic
complaints. Okay, Bob, I told him, let’s keep it — but I’ll bet you
anything that someone, most likely someone from the Greater Loser
Community, will notice it as soon as I post the cartoon. Or that someone
would rant about this gross historical inaccuracy as an entry for Week
1220.
Not. One. Peep.
Meanwhile, it didn’t even occur to me that, up from the offending hand,
Bob had depicted Tricky Dick with a remarkably phallic set of nose and
jowls.
The terms of the bet? Nothing material, but I told him“You can tease me
on your Facebook page for being anal.”
This cartoon, just published in the New Yorker, is right in tune with
the Week 1220 contest, and also reminded me of a winning entry in our
six-word-stories contest. (Cartoon (c) 2017 Robert Leighton//The New
Yorker. Used by permission.)
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Maybe it’s that I’m obviously a card-carrying pedant myself (hey, I was
a copy editor for 30 years; it’s a job requirement) that I didn’t find
too many entries to love in Week 1220. Ones that simply contradicted a
figurative expression or quote tended to fall flat unless a good joke
was attached (as in Gregory Koch’s “Mary, Mary, quite contrary”
observation). As I’d predicted, I ended up favoring jokes that made fun
of the complainer’s nitpicking.
*Speaking of “nitpicking”:* I happened to see Robert Leighton’s new New
Yorker cartoon shared on
Facebook just as I was finishing the judging of this contest; it got the
joke across so cleverly that I wrote to Leighton to ask if I could show
it here (it’s just above this paragraph). He graciously went to the
editors at the New Yorker over the weekend and got permission for me.
Actually, a darker, even more elegant version of Leighton’s joke was
told by Hall of Fame Loser Tom Witte in 2006 as a winning entry in our
contest for six-word stories: “My wife’s suicide note: ungrammatical,
naturally.” (Full results arehere
;
scroll down past the new contest.)
It’s the 26th win — and the 1,281st blot of Invite ink (along with Nos.
1,282 and 1,283) — for the gloriously nerdy Kevin Dopart. That
second-place Seth Tucker and third-place Mark Raffman are both
Harvard-educated corporate lawyers (as is the honorably mentioned John
Hutchins) has, I’m sure, nothing to do with their accomplished
nitpickery. I don’t think fourth-place Ivars Kuskevics has the same
affliction in his background; he deals with foreign-aid budgets for the
State Department (hope he doesn’t run out of work to do).
One entry that was going to get big ink until I found out that it wasn’t
at all true — I had specified that “the quibbling should be at least
literally accurate” — was this from Bill Dorner: “They say, ‘What’s good
for the goose is good for the gander.’ Well ‘they’ must not be
ornithologists. According to a 2014 study sponsored by the Canadian Foie
Gras Producers’ Association, alfalfa is the optimal feed for female
geese, whereas it gives male geese loose stools. Good for the gander
indeed!”
*What Doug Dug:* The faves this week of Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood are
Seth’s “it goes without saying” runner-up, and Kevin’s winning “diamonds
are not forever” plus his complaint about the redundancy “foreign
imports.” Cool fact: The Post’s new proofreading app, Tansa — in
addition to typos, it flags thousands of other potential violations of
the Post stylebook — pointed out “foreign imports” when I ran it on the
Invite (and this column) and suggested using “imports” instead. I
remember worrying back in the early 1980s that newfangled
spelling-checking software would take my copy-editing job away;
fortunately it didn’t become good enough until I retired. (Tansa does
not yet write punny headlines, at least.)
*BEYOND COMPARE: A FEW THOUGHTS ON THIS WEEK’S CONTEST*
Our perennial contest to compare two items on a list dates back at least
to Week 155 in 1996; as was often the case in the Czarist era, the
winner was Chuck Smith of Woodbridge, Va.: “What is the difference
between *a bowling ball *and *the devoted followers of Pat Buchanan*? A
bowling ball requires an opposable thumb.”
In the more than 20 compare-and-contrast contests since then, a few joke
constructions pop up almost every time. One is to note two
similar-sounding phrases or spoonerisms. Like these two from 2012:
*Michael Phelps *can outdo any guy in the pool, while*the Desperate
Housewives *are out to do any guy in the pool. (Chris Doyle)
*Beethoven,* stone deaf, created serious music; *Howard Stern*, tone
deaf, creates Sirius mucus. (Harold Mantle)
I can run lots of those in a given week, but there’s another perennial
construction that I shouldn’t use more than once per contest: It’s “The
difference between Item A and Item B: One is [you think it’s describing
Item A]; the other is Item A.” The joke lies in the surprise to the
reader, so running several of these entries at once would kill their
effect. But I think they still work well one at a time.
Last year this one from First Offender (and still One-Hit Wonder) Paul
Totman was a runner-up: *The last Cheeto in the bag *vs. *Tiny Hands:*
One is an unnatural orange mess that leaves a bad taste in your mouth;
the other one isn’t a nickname of someone running for president.
The form nabbed Ellen Ryan a whoopee cushion in 2013: *The National
Zucchini Fair* vs.*the Rolling Stones*: One is a celebration of phallic
vegetables. The other is a gardening event.
And here’s one by David Genser from back in 1997: What is the difference
between *an ethics lecture from Newt Gingrich *and*Ruth Bader Ginsburg
doing the Macarena?* One is an elaborate dance done with the palms out,
and the other is a Supreme Court justice. (That one inverts the order; I
think it would have worked a bit better with Gingrich and Ginsburg
switched.)
Similarly, this from Joseph Romm in 1996: The difference between*Bob
Dole’s grandfather *and *Saddam Hussein’s brother-in-law?* One of them
was a blood relative of a man who has been in power far too long and is
on the verge of leading his nation to ruin, and the other was related
only by marriage.
Last year I specified for the first time that in addition to saying how
the two items were similar or different, you could also “connect them
some other way.” That extra flexibility paid off with Kathy El-Assal’s
runner-up: “An *all-you-can-eat buffet *and*leftover Valentine’s candy:*
Oh, you Match.com Casanova, you!” Kathy could have just said “They’re
both part of the worst Match.com date ever,” but her version is so much
funnier. So I welcome other creative links this year as well.
And I’ve also started welcoming multi-item links; last year I’d
specified two items and had to bend the rules because this entry from
Chris Doyle was just too good:
*The Pentagon:* Think eyes on Iraq.
*Scrabble tiles:* Think I’s on a rack.
*7th-grade boys:* Think eyes on a rack.
*CHARGE UP TO GETTYSBURG: LOSER BRUNCH/TOUR THIS SUNDAY!*
(Repeated from last week’s Conversational)
Once again — and at a much more seasonable time of year than the past
midsummers — Losers and Gettysburg residents Roger Dalrymple and Marty
McCullen will host a Loser brunch followed by a tour of the Gettysburg
battlefield and other historic sites. It starts at noon on Sunday, April
23, with lunch at the Appalachian Brewing Company pub, and then Roger,
who’s an experienced and delightful tour guide, will take the Loser
delegation around and point out the fascinating fictoids. I can’t make
it this year, but I’ve gone several times and really recommend it,
especially if you enjoy walking. Our usual brunch coordinator, Elden
Carnahan, is in Europe right now, so it’s best to contact Roger directly
at rogerandpam (at) comcast (dot) net if you’d like to come.