Style Conversational Week 1356: That’s what she said The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s absolutely non-erotic results, and the new Ask Backwards contest The Empress was shocked! shocked! that the Loser Community made the most mundane of quotidian activities sound dirrrteee. (Elise Amendola/AP) The Empress was shocked! shocked! that the Loser Community made the most mundane of quotidian activities sound dirrrteee. (Elise Amendola/AP) By Pat Myers Oct. 31, 2019 at 3:45 p.m. EDT If you read the results of Style Invitational Week 1352 in The Post’s Nov. 3 Arts & Style section, you’ll see 12 funny faux-racy accounts of mundane or otherwise nonsexual activities. But print edition readers won’t see such phrases as these: “Tom pressed up hard behind David, whose muscular back was bent over in anticipation. Tom reached quickly between his tensed thighs. …” “Fellatio!” he almost shouted. “He slid it in gently …” “When the tip emerged, a glistening drop of liquid quivered … ” Respectively: A quarterback takes the snap (Jon Ketzner); a spelling bee (Duncan Stevens); a CD player (Hildy Zampella); checking a car’s oil (First Offender Jack Doherty). My self-censorship for print seems to be sparing this week’s entries the fate of a similar contest I ran five years ago, in Week 1094: That was to write poems using any from a list we offered of obscure but dirty-sounding words, and the poems had to make sense with their actual meanings. Four weeks later in this column, (full column here), in one of my less pleasant weeks of my career, I explained what happened: “Sure don’t see why not. Words are words,” answered my editor a month ago when I sent him an e-mail titled “Can we do this contest?” I was pleased, of course, that he’d given the go-ahead to Loser Ward Kay’s suggestion of a poetry contest based on the list of “50 Words That Sound Rude but Really Aren’t.” And readers seemed to agree: Four weeks ago, in announcing the Week 1090 contest, The Style Invitational printed 40 or so of the words, both in print and online, including such genuine wholesome English words as “shittah,” “dreamhole,” “fuksheet” and “dik-dik” — without any indication of what their real meanings were … Yeah, it was a pretty immature idea. But “immature” is part of the Empress’s job description anyway, and, as I’d expected, we received the usual number of complaints for a Style Invitational column: zero. Four weeks later, however — yesterday evening — my editor had a serious change of heart. He remembered his earlier approval, “but after seeing the page today I think we just have to go another direction. There’s simply too much in there that crosses the line, when taking into account that we are still a family paper.” Fortunately, he agreed late this morning to let the entire set of results run online, and to allow the winner and two other entries — ones that weren’t double-entendres — to run in print. . Here are the results of Week 1094 online, annotated at the last minute to award runner-up prizes to my original choices as well as the ones I ended up making for print. Amazingly, whether because I’d banished the dismal episode from my mind or (more likely) general all-purpose senescence, Week 1094 hadn’t even occurred to me when I posted Week 1352, inspired by the humor piece “Sexual Fantasies of Everyday New Yorkers” by Mark Cognata, in the online New Yorker. But, though even the excerpt that I ran as an example that week (about someone thrilled that the barista had oat milk for his coffee) included such phrases as “down, down,” “pulls out” and “big, bulging” — and I got no flak about it before or after it ran — I knew that I had to stay away from the most (faux) explicit writing for the print edition, and indeed neither of the two copy editors who read it complained about any of the 12 entries. And while I know that inductive reasoning has been pooh-poohed since the ancients, I choose to believe that if I haven’t had a single taste complaint to management — for almost 16 years now — about anything that’s appeared in the Invitational only online, the nine graphic entries I run only in the lower half of the Web Invite this week won’t bring us down. Sorry, Jack Doherty, but I couldn’t mention your Fir Stink in the paper with an entry like that. It’s the first Lose Cannon — indeed, the first “above the fold” ink — for Jeff Strong, yet another of this year’s outstanding freshman class. Jeff’s sensual description (I’ll let you discover what it’s about) earns him his seventh blot of ink, and perhaps the motivation to start entering more. — What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood also singled out Jeff’s winning entry among his faves, but first noted Kevin Dopart’s belt-tugger as well as the “And Last” entry, Tom Witte’s “secret love. Let’s just call her ‘E.’” (That was just one of several Empress-fantasies. I shuddered repeatedly.) And the answer is … a 10-year-old jar of natural peanut butter: It’s Ask Backwards Once again, it’s The Style Invitational’s most frequently presented contest — by my count, Week 1356 is No. 38 — in which you write a funny A&Q starting with one of the 16 items we throw at you. Obviously, there’s a different set of “answers” each time, but for guidance and inspiration, here are a few random winners from Asks Backwards 1 through 37. Honorable mention from the first contest, Week 24, 1993: A. Lorena Bobbitt or Mahatma Gandhi. Q. Who was the wrong person to tell: “Don’t make trouble. Just lie back, be quiet, and think of England”? (Jackson Bross) Runner-up from Week 264, 1998: A. Leonardo DiCaprio’s dental hygienist. Q. Who is the only woman on earth likely to give Leonardo DiCaprio the brush? (Mike Genz) Runner-up from Week 801, 2009: A. Ferret booties. Q. According to a recent poll, what are most male ferrets interested in, way ahead of “good ferret personality” and “good ferret sense of humor”? (Tom Witte) Runner-up from Week 995, 2012: A. The thing that goes “woo.” Q. During one of his senior moments, what did Joe Biden call his beloved Metroliner? (Kevin Dopart; Susan Thompson) Runner-up from Week 1249, 2017: A. Mike Pence’s favorite pastime. Q. What are cold showers? (Rob Huffman) Runner-up from our last Ask Backwards contest, Week 1302: A. An almost-everything bagel. Q. What favorite food did Elizabeth Warren cite as evidence of her Jewish heritage? (Mark Raffman) For literally hundreds and hundreds more entries, go to the Master Contest List at the Losers’ own website, and search on “backward.” Note the week number, then look down three or four weeks to see the link to the results to that contest. Repeat up to 37 times. We’re gonna be movie stars! Come to the Nov. 10 Loser brunch I’d mentioned some time ago that the editors of The Lily, an online Post publication targeted at young women, wanted to do a piece — probably a short video — about The Style Invitational and the phenomenon that is the Loser Community. And I heard this afternoon that they plan to send someone to our next social event, the Loser Brunch on Sunday, Nov. 10. It’s at noon at Paradiso Italian Restaurant, 6124 Franconia Rd., Alexandria (just outside the Beltway between the Van Dorn Street and Springfield exits). There’s a big buffet, but you can also order from the menu if you don’t have an Empress-size appetite for both breakfast and lunch fare. And mimosas. Anyone is welcome: ink-blotters, auxiliaries of ink-blotters, and just Invite fans. So we can get a head count, please RSVP to Elden Carnahan on the Losers’ website, NRARS.org (click on “Our Social Engorgements”). Meanwhile, Insanely Successful Loser Jesse Frankovich has found out that his schedule on Nov. 18-20 — he’ll be in D.C. from Michigan for a convention — has him booked all day. The best bet to get together, he says, is sometime after 5 p.m. on Tuesday the 19th, in the Foggy Bottom area. Time to put on all those Peach-with-Mint-and-an-M costumes!