Style Conversational Week 1277: Tapping the hive mind
The Style Invitational Empress on this week’s Spelling Bee-inspired
contest
Another of Alex Blackwood's sample neologisms, "truebut," was supposed
to be "True, but ..." But Bob Staake sees "but" and thinks: A true butt.
So we went with the more illustratable "burbitate," to feel an urge to
move out of the city. (Bob Staake for The Washington Post)
By
Pat Myers
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Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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April 26, 2018 at 3:04 p.m. EDT
One of my very slightly guilty pleasures is my digital subscription to
the New York Times’s crosswords and other puzzles; even though The Post
runs perfectly good daily puzzles
from
the L.A. Times — plus Evan Birnholz’s superior Sunday crossword,
constructed expressly for The Post — I especially enjoy the NYT’s
Thursday-Saturday puzzles, which are progressively challenging and have
lots of ingenious wordplay in the clues.
And crossword subscribers also get to play all the “variety” puzzles,
such as the biweekly acrostic and, every week, the simply designed but
compellingly challenging Spelling Bee, the contest whose letter sets we
use this week for an entirely different challenge in Week 1277
of The Style Invitational. Spelling Bee goes
up online every Thursday at 10 p.m., and by 10:02 I’m usually logged on
with my pen and paper nearby, eager to see how many words I can form
from that week’s seven letters, all of them including one designated
letter among the seven.
It’s even more fun to compare my word list the next morning with those
of my predecessor,the Czar,
as
well as with Alex Blackwood, the Houston resident who’s become my
co-admin in the Style Invitational Devotees
Facebook group, sharing the duties of
introducing the new members and checking with applicants to make sure
they weren’t looking for something about styles and fashion (because
boyoboy would they be at the wrong place). I usually but not always
think of a couple more words than the Czar, but Alex(andra) is
/incredible/ at this game: The “genius” level the puzzle offers might
be 20 points in a given week (words using all seven letters get three
points; the others get one) and I’ll be all jazzed about getting 23, and
then Alex clocks in with 47 points.
In fact, she was generating words so fast on the letter set UBATRIE a
few weeks ago that she started listing Spanish words as well, and then
started making up words and definitions — some of which I promptly
lifted for this contest.
When I got in touch with the Times to make sure it was okay with our
using its letter sets, product director Eric von Coelln told me that as
early as next week, Spelling Bee will become a daily feature, with the
minimum word length shortened to four letters. I’m gonna have to call in
the self-discipline . . .
Anyway, Week 1277 is /not/ the Spelling Bee game; I’m just using some of
its letters sets and, more significantly, the option of using letters
repeatedly while not needing to use all or even most of the seven
letters. These concepts tripped me up the first time or two that I
played the game. But they should allow for a huge variety of words.
(This is why I listed only 15 sets this week, instead of the 40 I’d
offered for the ScrabbleGrams contests .)
Please fill out your entries in the requested way!
*CABINET REFACING*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1273*
/Non-inking headline submitted by both William Kennard and Jeff
Contompasis/
Whooeee, will we have a challenge a few years hence in figuring out what
the heck these inking entries from Week 1273
were about. Mrs. Ben Carson? Scott Pruitt’s “low-cost housing”? April
the Giraffe? Fears that all the entries would be too screedy — bitterly
unhumorous — didn’t materialize, but there was a whole lot of
duplication of some general ideas. If someone else got ink with an entry
that’s along the same line as yours, please let me know as soon as
possible and I’ll send you a Kleenex.
Duncan Stevens really inked up the joint this week, winning the Invite
(for the fifth time) with his you-have-to-say-it-out-loud “pee score”
Emily Litella
joke, plus scoring a runner-up and two honorable mentions that bump him
up to 246 blots of ink all-time. The other two entrants who managed to
squeeze into the Losers’ Circle between Duncan and More Duncan are also
Invite veterans: It’s the 20th appearance “above the fold” for Rob
Huffman, the 16th for Ira Allen.
Still, there was ink for First Offender Alison Thompson (who was lured
to the Invitational by the fabulous prizes won by her husband, nine-time
Loser Mark Calandra), as well as for William Pifer-Foote, whose one
previous ink dates back to 2000 (contest to combine two TV shows: “The
Fugitive Survivor”: The fat naked gay guy runs all over the country
trying to find anyone who cares anymore”).
*What Doug Dug: * The faves of Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood this week
were the dig about (soon-to-resign?) Scott Pruitt and his $50-a-night
condo rental from a lobbyist, very similar entries from both Frank Mann
and John Glenn; Superman as an undocumented immigrant, by Ward Kay; and
the Yosemite Sam/John Bolton joke at the end by William Pifer-Foote,
who’s been on the Losers’ One Hit Wonder list
since Week 375, November 2000.
*FURLONG LONG TIME *
Welp, now it’s time to dig back into the 4,300-ish “foal” names entered
for Week 1274 (results next week). In
response to some recent questions about my judging method:
1. No, not all in one sitting. I’ll do a few hundred, then take a break
and do something else for a while. I do hate to waste paper, but like
working from a printout for this particular contest, since I can look at
entries here and there when I’m in line at the post office, during that
exasperating interval when they put you in the doctor’s exam room and
then just leave you there, etc. This year’s printout runs 229
single-spaced pages; I do use both sides of the paper, at least.
2. A whole lot of entries make the first cut. A whole lot of entries are
good! Even if 90 percent of the submissions totally stink (which isn’t
the case), we’re talking about 400 good ones. Every year, I try to be
more discriminating in that first pass, but I usually end up with a
“shortlist” of 200 names. Then I have to toss about 75 percent of those.
3. I have been known to use performance-enhancing drugs. I break one of
these guys
into
halves or thirds. That and coffee. If I get sleepy, I’ll stop judging.
Except for yours; I sleep right through yours.
I will never stop thanking Loser Jonathan Hardis for sorting the entries
so that judging on a printout is even possible, and for saving me hours
and hours and hours of searching on each of the 100 names, twice over. I
always hope that Jonathan enters and gets ink, something I won’t know
until after I’ve made my final picks next Monday or Tuesday.
*LOSER PARENTING FAIL? *
Last week Danielle Nowlin won the Invitational for the 11th time, and
her second Lose Cannon. The only problem was that the Imperial Provider
of Ordnance, the Royal Consort, still needed to put together more
trophies. So I asked Danielle whether she’d rather instead have the poop
emoji slippers-and-pillow set
that
Chris Doyle had declined after winning second place in Week 1270. After
all, Danielle is the mother of three winsome tykes, none of them close
to adolescence.
She reported back: “My LoserKinder have rejected the emoji items too.
I’ll have to work on their sense of lowbrow.
“I’ll take the Lose Cannon after all!”
So I guess the Emoji Ensemble is destined as some sort of award to be
given out at the Flushies, the Losers’ annual awards (potluck) banquet,
on Saturday afternoon, June 9. Contact me if you want to be added to the
Evite list.