Style Conversational Week 1227: MASTERMINDS INFILTRATE NEWSPAPER
The Style Invitational Empress discusses the week’s new contest and
results
We don’t always dwell on Trump: We’re an equal-opportunity
strongman-mocker here at The Style Invitational. Here are Putin and
Turkey Head, the latter of whom ended up with runner-up ink in this
week’s results. (Yuri Kochetkov/Pool photo via AP)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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May 11, 2017
Sorry, if you didn’t get a lot of laughs out of the results of Week 1223
in this week’s Style Invitational, you might
as well ditch the Invite and move on to the stock listings; this week’s
juicy headlines for non-juicy news are the essence of Gettable Invite
Humor. I laughed out loud repeatedly while judging this contest, and the
other people I shared the results with beforehand — including the Royal
Consort, who patiently listens to me read them in the car — got a kick
out of them too.
But along with the gems were a surprising number of headlines, long
lists of them, that didn’t fit this contest. I thought my description
was pretty clear when I announced Week 1223 :
“Write a humorously sensationalistic, misleading headline on an
otherwise mundane article or ad published in The Post or elsewhere from
April 13 to April 24.” In addition, I’d provided several clear examples
in the Invite from Week 540, when we did this contest earlier, as well
as thewhole set of results from that contest in
this column.
But a lot of people instead sent me sort of upside-down entries for our
perennial Mess With Our Heads contest. In that one, you take just the
headline of the story and write a “bank head” based on a
misinterpretation of that headline. Which is what some people must have
been thinking of when they sent heads like this:
SOCCER STAR SOLO FIGHTS THE LAW AGAIN
In Uganda, Hope Imprisoned (real headline from The Post)
and
RABIES SCARE HAUNTS FAN AT BALLGAME!
Injured by errant bat at Orioles game, woman sues
I do sometimes find, though, that a contest description that was totally
clear to me is confusing to others; in fact, I rewrote the Week 1227
description twice after posting the Invite this morning and getting
feedback on the Style Invitational Devotees
Facebook page. (More on that below.)
Anyway, clearly enough Losers (including two First Offenders) understood
what the Empress was looking for; I’d call these a classic set of
results. And I might use a few more when I’ll be running some extra
honorable mentions from various contests when I’ll be on vacation in
mid-July (I might have to do an unprecedented two columns in advance).
Then maybe I’ll have a chance to run one or more of the many good
sports-themed entries that missed the cut this week; I didn’t want to
swamp this week’s results with more than the several that did get ink.
This week’s Inkin’ Memorial goes to Jon Gearhart — for the second week
in a row: Last week’s Jon’s “Midnight Pleasure x Archimedes = Lover &
Lever” beat out 3,900 entries in the foal name contest. Winning the
Invite for two straight weeks is a rare though not shocking occurrence —
it last happened in July 2016 (Annette Green) and before that in July
2015 (Brendan Beary). What’s rarer is that both entries were the
unanimous choice of everyone I showed the entries to: With the word
“after,” which can mean one second later or a million years later, and
might or might not imply causation, GOP CONGRESSMAN FOUND DEAD AFTER
CALLING FOR PRESIDENT’S IMPEACHMENT perfectly fooled the reader into
thinking that the headline was about something that just happened,
something that would be at least 10 percent more shocking than the
actual political events that are unfolding daily. (Jon’s headline
actually refers to the obit of a member of the 1974 House Watergate
Committee.) This Inkin’ Memorial is now Jon’s third; I was going to send
it out in a box with the other one, but I wasn’t sure he’d rather have
three bobbleheads rather than another prize.
Another Loser who’s on a roll lately is Dave Matuskey, our second-place
winner, scoring with ROCKETS TAKE OUT ACTIVE SHOOTER for a basketball
story. Dave is still an Invite rookie, with a modest-sounding total of
23 blots of ink — but 11 of them have been since mid-March. As first
runner-up, Dave gets those lovely squares, hand-crocheted by Loser Jesse
Frankovich, that spell out LOSER or SLORE or ORLES et al. (I love to
award handmade Loserly crafts as prizes.)
While Duncan “Turkey Head” Stevens is a familiar name in the Losers’
Circle, fourth place this week goes to a First Offender: Kathy K.
MacDonald’s “BABY WITH 4-FOOT NECK” was my favorite of about a dozen
April the Giraffe entries; the other one that got ink combined elements
of Frank Osen’s and Chris Doyle’s entries (“prisoner” and “without
mother’s consent”).
*What Doug Dug: * Ace copy editor and former Boss Of The Empress Doug
Norwood tells me that in addition to especially enjoying the results and
agreeing with the “above the fold” choices, he also particularly liked
Chris Doyle’s OLDER WOMEN FIND PADDLING A TURN-ON (about rowing); Frank
Osen’s SAW-WIELDING MAN VOWS TO RIP MUSICIAN A NEW ‘F-HOLE’ (about a
guitar builder); THOUSANDS OF AFFLUENT D.C. RESIDENTS EXPLOIT MEALS ON
WHEELS (about food trucks) by another First Offender, Michelle Kelley;
and Seth Tucker’s FOX KILLS HOUND, about the cancellation of Bill
O’Reilly’s show.
*A GAME OF SINGLES: THIS WEEK’S NEOLOGISM CONTEST*
I’m always looking for a new set of parameters for a neologism contest;
I regularly receive emails asking when the “annual neologism contest”
will be, from people who’ve read, say, the results of Week 278
on
someone’s blog. We actually manage to keep expanding the English
language with contests several times a year; our last one was in
February, when we put up a word-search grid in Week 1216
and asked you to discover new terms within it.
Loser Jeff Shirley — who also scored four blots of ink this week — came
to the rescue with this week’s contest, Week 1227,
which presents the challenge of coming up
with a term in which no letters repeat, as well as the mild limitation
that it had to be about “a life form” rather than, say, a kitchen
appliance or a tax form. (Yes, the president of the United States counts
as a life form.) It was a good thing that Jeff also supplied several
good examples, since when I started looking through previous neologism
results, there weren’t all that many in which no letter appeared twice.
(By the way: I’d originally said that the name of the new “life form”
must “not repeat any letters.” But a moment after I published the Invite
this morning, it occurred to me that a reader might think I meant that
you can’t use two letters in a row, but might have the same letter in
different places within the term. So I quickly changed it to “no letter
in the term may be used twice.” But then a veteran Loser expressed
confusion with that construction. So now it reads “all the letters of
its name must be different.” I hope you understand.)
As always, neologisms are almost alterations of existing words or a
combination of two. But there’s no rule this week that requires, for
example, that only one letter be changed; there’s not even a rule that
you have to play on another word — if you can come up with a novel and
clever term that doesn’t, go for it: I can’t think of one now, but we
must have used sui generis terms /sometime / in our dozens of past
neologism contests.
And remember, the Empress will take out for ice cream any local who
suggests a contest I go on to use. I’m picky; I have to feel confident
that the idea will work (good examples are persuasive!) but I really do
appreciate and use lots of ideas. Not just neologisms, of course; anyone
have a good theme or parameters for our next song parody contest?
*READY TO FLUSH?: GET INVITED TO THE JUNE 17 FLUSHIES *
Now that our general Style Invitational email notification list numbers
10,000 Losers, Aspiring Losers and General Hangers-On (as the salutation
of the weekly email addresses them), I’m not going to send all those
people an invitation to this year’s Flushies, the Losers’ annual awards
“banquet” (potluck/songfest/silliness at someone’s house). Instead,
we’ll do it through Evite.com, which worked well for the Loser
Post-Holiday Party this past January.
As it was last year, the 2017 Flushies will be on a Saturday afternoon
at RK Acres, the 10-acre farmstead of Loser Robin Diallo and non-Loser
husband Khalil, out in Lothian, Md., in Anne Arundel County south of
Annapolis. The Diallos have a big barn and numerous pettable barnyard
animals, so it’s a family-friendly site. The Flushies are a great way to
meet the Losers, some of whom come in from out of town for the occasion.
(It’s rumored that there are some sightseeing opportunities in nearby
Washington and Baltimore.)
I’ll start with the Evite list from January and add local people who’ve
gotten ink recently. But if you’re reading this column, even if you’re
not a Loser, you’re invited. If you want to make sure you get the Evite,
email me at pat.myers@washpost.com, with something in the subject line
that I’ll see, and I’ll add you. (Even if you think you’ll get the
Evite, I won’t mind if you contact me anyway.)