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Yes Not now * // * Sections // <#> * // <#> * Home The Washington Post logo Democracy Dies in Darkness <#> * Try 1 month for $1 * Elden Carnahan * Sign In ------------------------------------------------------------------------ o My Post / / o My Reading List / / o Account Settings / / o Newsletters & alerts / / o Gift subscriptions / / o Contact us / / o Help desk / / * Elden Carnahan * Basic Digital subscriber * Sign out * My Post / / * My Reading List / / * Account Settings / / * Newsletters & alerts / / * Gift subscriptions / / * Contact us / / * Help desk / / * Accessibility for screenreader The Washington Post Share Options Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Tumblr Comments <#comments> Link to homepage Resize Text Print Article Discussions Style Conversational Week 1243: Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before Add to list On my list The Style Invitational Empress ruminates all over this week’s contest & results It wasn’t until last night, after seeing Bob Staake’s finished illustration for this week’s example, that it occurred to me that we’d used this very example before, 12 years ago. (By Bob Staake, from the March 20, 2005, Style section) By Pat Myers Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email // Bio // Follow // August 31, 2017 Ha, yeah, that was a good one. In March 2005, a year and a bit into my Empressacy, I ran a Style Invitational neologism contest to change a word by one letter — a repeat of the contest I call Our Greatest Hit. Theresults of Week 278, from 1998, continue to circulate through the Internet to this day, often misattributed and corrupted by inferior additions . The 2005 redo had one change from the 1998: It restricted the neologisms to plays on words that begin with A- through D-. The neologisms themselves, though, didn’t have to begin with those letters; the first letter of the word could be changed to any other letter — and I wanted one of the contest examples to make that clear. So for Week 602, I asked Bob Staake to illustrate one of the Week 278 honorable mentions, “vaseball” by Enormously Obsessive Loser Russell Beland, who was then the father of two young boys. It wasn’t until this past Tuesday night, when Bob showed me his illustration forWeek 1243 , that it rang a bell. Bong. I’d given Bob a list of possible neologisms, and he chose this one, obviously not remembering its predecessor either. I asked him if he noticed any changes in his own style over the past dozen years. “My vases looked more Navajo-inspired in 2005,” Bob observed. Anyway, it turns out that there are a few — but remarkably few — neologisms from our many past contests to work in this week’s contest. Loser Mark Raffman had first suggested a contest in which nothing in the whole joke would contain a T, R, U, M or P, but we agreed that was a maddeningly tall order. This one — that just the term be t-r-u-m-p-less — still offers a large array of options. *A bit of advice:* Before you send in your list of entries, make a list of your neologisms and then search on your computer for each of the five verboten letters. I can tell you that they’re easy to miss: As an illustration of how a word could lack the letters but still allude to the guy, I had almost used Stephen Dudzik’s 2008 “Innuendow: The implication that the size of one’s hands and feet correspond to other appendages.” It has a U. This is the second neologism contest in three weeks; usually I wait at least a month. But I don’t expect much overlap with Week 1241’s crossword fill-in , a contest I haven’t judged yet. (But first I have to finish the limericks of Week 1240 .) *MASHIN’ PICTURES*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1239* /*Non-inking headline entry submitted by both Chris Doyle and Tom Witte/ Though I hate wasting paper, I do indulge myself sometimes by working from a printout to judge the week’s entries; I can curl up in a chair or bring it into a waiting room, and scribble notes for later. I usually use pretty small type, though; for the Week 1239 movie title mash-ups, 18 to 20 entries fit onto a page. (Okay, there were more than 100 pages, but I used both sides.) So it was rather dismaying when I started judging this contest and couldn’t find a single movie mash-up I liked on the first page. Or the second. So many of the entries combined two movies but went nowhere with them to make a joke (e.g., “Goldilocks and the Three Stooges: Shirley Temple and Moe, Larry & Curly star in this comedy version of the classic fairy tale”). But even with my top-to-bottom pen slash through many a whole page of entries, I also encountered dozens of good ones, often in clumps. When you have 2,000 entries to choose from, it doesn’t matter one bit if 95 percent of them are yawners — as long as the remainder are funny. And in fact, I ended up adding a few extra entries to the results of Week 1239 that didn’t fit on the print page. And so, hurrah, we have a fun list of single-multiplexes from 28 individual Losers (I’d feared there would be only a few, because of the aforementioned clumping). They’re topped by Jon Gearhart’s suddenly timely “A Few Good X-Men,” which combines the military theme of the first movie with wordplay on the second. It’s Jon’s fourth Invite win (and 126th and 127th blots of ink in all), so if he’d like, I’ll send him one of our newLose Cannon trophies instead of a fourth Inkin’ Memorial bobblehead. (I still a few more Abes left!) iThird- and fourth-placers Jesse Frankovich and Mark Raffman already have more Loser bags and mugs than they know what to do with, so I’ve been sending them some vintage honorable-mention magnets from before they began Inviting. But it’s the first “above-the-fold’ ink — and just the fourth blot ever — from James Kruger, who wins the pig snout ball cap. James’s first ink was also a movie-themed contest, Week 1008, in which you had to rearrange the words of a title: “Kids, I Shrunk the Honey: One family manages just fine on unsweetened tea.” But it was most memorable for James’s location at the time: Butha-Buthe, Lesotho. (He was in the Peace Corps.) We haven’t had a whole lot of Basotho (that’s the adjective) ink since then. This week also marks the welcome return of a Loser From Really Way Back: Arthur Adams got his first of his nine inks (before today) in Week 84 — 23 years ago — and his most recent in Week 898 ... when he won the whole contest. Late-2010 predictions for 2011: “April 11: President Obama begins a Rose Garden news conference by saying he loves spring and April is his favorite month. Bill O’Reilly fumes that Obama’s clear hatred of December is part of the War on Christmas, while Glenn Beck ominously reminds his viewers that Hitler was born in April.” Arthur’s two honorable mentions catapult him from No. 458 to 417 (okay, it’s a mini-catapult) in the all-time Loser standings. Meanwhile, I’ve saved a list of 16 funny mash-up movie titles whose descriptions, well, weren’t quite as funny. Maybe I’ll use them as part of a future contest, offering them up to the entire Greater Loser Community to do them justice. 0 Comments conversations Read These Comments newsletter The best comments and conversations at The Washington Post, delivered every Friday. Join the conversation. Thank You! You are now subscribed to /Read These Comments/ Please enter a valid email address You might also like... Sign up See all newsletters By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Pat Myers Pat Myers is editor and judge of The Style Invitational, The Washington Post's page for clever, edgy humor and wordplay. In the role since December 2003, she has posted and judged more than 700 contests. She also writes the weekly Style Conversational column and runs the Style Invitational Devotees page on Facebook. Follow // Latest episode The Texas teenagers who allegedly smuggled immigrants across the southern border Listen25:02 Unparalleled reporting. Expert insight. Clear analysis. Everything you’ve come to expect from the newsroom of The Post -- for your ears. 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