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
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Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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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.