Style Conversational Week 1303: Ai-ai-ai! Phoneme business The Style Invitational Empress dishes on this week’s new contest and results "Puggle" -- a pug-beagle mix -- figured in four of this week's inking word chains. (Wikipedia) "Puggle" -- a pug-beagle mix -- figured in four of this week's inking word chains. (Wikipedia) By Pat Myers close Image without a caption Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email Email Bio Bio Follow Follow Oct. 25, 2018 at 3:16 p.m. EDT When Jeff Contompasis suggested this week’s Style Invitational contest to me a few months ago, complete with several good examples, I mused to him, “I wonder how much time we’d spend dickering over what is and isn’t a digraph.” I’m not an expert on phonetics — though I did get an A in Linguistics 101 in the summer of 1976, which I recall very clearly as lacking air conditioning — and so I’m likely oversimplifying, but I hope we’ll avoid getting bogged down in the h[ai]rspli[tt]i[ng]. (But not [spl], which by my count has three letters.) You know, we’re a humor contest, and fans of the Invite seem to enjoy both making up new words and reading the ones that others make up. And it’s always fun to ask for these new words with some new challenge. So when someone coins a funny word that might not be an actual digraph-for-digraph switch, but it’s at least arguable, I’m likely to risk the quibbles that might appear on The Post’s Free for All letters page (suggested motto: Nitworthy Correspondence). But here’s a nice chart of phonemes — individual sounds — along with graphemes, which are how phonemes are /spelled./ So look at the graphemes and look for the two-letter ones. As I said in the instructions, we’re ignoring the ones in which the digraph is of unconnected letters, like a long vowel sound and a silent E. One thing I can rule out is a set of two letters that are split across syllables. In our “hairsplitting” example, you can’t use “rs.” But otherwise I’ll keep the hairs pretty thick and healthy; don’t sweat the technicalities. If there are two digraphs you’d like to replace in the same word, that’s okay — but remember that risks making the original word impossible to guess. (Already, a certain Style Invitational artist thought that Jeff’s example of “crone fruit” had something to do with Crohn’s disease. It’s actually a play on “stone fruit.”) Deadline is, as usual, the second Monday night after the contest is posted: in this case, Nov. 5. But unless there’s some new schedule I don’t know about, I’ll be posting the results a day earlier than usual — on Wednesday, Nov. 21, the day before Thanksgiving. Watch for the email notification! *CHAIN > CHAIN > CHAIN >>> CHAIN > CHAIN > CHAIN: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1299* There are your gut-laugh Style Invitational contests and there are your, well, head-laughs: the ones where your reaction (we hope) is more like “Hah! Clever!” Our word/name-chain contests, like Week 1299 , tend to be the latter. I’d think that they’re more fun to do, like a puzzle, than to read, but they do have their fans: A concert violinist from San Francisco wrote to me some years back to tell me how he loved to read all the name chains, and we had a nice chat when his ensemble came to Washington to play at the National Gallery. I hope that someone besides Rick Shinozaki of the Del Sol Quartet (terrific, exciting performances of contemporary music, by the way) shares that opinion. Judging each entry in a name chain contest is like judging a bunch of entries at once: You think it out one word at a time and look for something funny or clever in as many links as possible — and often puzzle out what the connection is. In general, the funniest links come from words used in different meanings as they link to the next word. My short­list was much longer than the 32 entries that get ink this week; there were a lot of entries full of clever links. I felt a bit arbitrary picking the final ones, but I did look for chains that had at least some links that were /funny. /I searched through all the entries for each of the new Scrabble words — the basis of our Week 1299 word list — one at a time, so I didn’t realize until after picking the winners that so many of them — five each — were by Mark Raffman and Chris Doyle. I’m not shocked, though. Nor am I surprised that the Lose Cannon went to Kevin Dopart, who wins the Invite for the 27th time as he leaves the 1,400-ink mark behind and trots briskly toward the Triple Hall of Fame. Meanwhile, second-placer Jesse Frankovich is veritably galloping: Jesse’s three inking entries this week plus the “Word Series MVPs” headline brings him to 400 blots — all but 45 of them in the past three years. *NEXT LOSER SIGHTING: SHOULD IT BE TRIVIAL? * **Newbie Loser Jesse Rifkin saw that the Nov. 11 Loser Brunch would be at theHeavy Seas Alehouse in the Rosslyn area of Arlington, Va. — and pointed out that the pub would be hosting a trivia night that same evening, and would dinner-and-trivia be better? I’m afraid that a conflict has come up and I wouldn’t be able to make it either way, but if you’d favor one slot or the other, contact Elden Carnahan at the “Our Social Engorgements” page at the Losers’ website,NRARS.org . For now, though, assume that the gathering will be at noon as usual. *PUNKINED* Happy Halloween, all. Here’s a PDF of the results of Week 682 , in which the Losers did some funny stuff with pumpkins and other vegetables.