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 Email // Bio // Follow // 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.)