Style Conversational Week 1362: Do Wit Again The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s retrospective and the ‘Night Before Christmas’ ink Our 21st winter potluck/singalong will be on Saturday evening, Jan. 11, in Chevy Chase, Md. And YOU are expressly invited. See below. Our 21st winter potluck/singalong will be on Saturday evening, Jan. 11, in Chevy Chase, Md. And YOU are expressly invited. See below. By Pat Myers Dec. 12, 2019 at 4:50 p.m. EST I love The Style Invitational’s now-yearly retrospective contests, in which you can get another chance at the past year’s Invites. As we’ve been doing the last few years, we’ll do the first half of the year (November-May) this week, with Week 1362, and, well, I’ll let you be surprised about what we do next week. As I promised in this week’s contest in both the print and online versions, I’d make finding the contests as easy as I could by supplying a list of links here in the Conversational. You can also go to the Master Contest List at the Losers’ own website, NRARS.org, and click on the various icons for PDFs of the print or online version of each week. Both there and here, remember to check the results of the contest you’re entering (or reentering), to make sure you’re not sending in the same joke: So scroll down four weeks to see the Invite that runs those results. I’m supplying two links for each contest: One is to The Post’s online Invite, the real thing; the other, labeled “Archive,” is a PDF of that same version, which Elden Carnahan keeps on the Master Contest List so we’ll always have a copy if The Post’s link goes away someday, or loses the cartoon (these things have happened surprisingly recently). The PDFs there and below are not behind The Post’s paywall and so nonsubscribers (who should be subscribers, gotta tell you) can read them. The only drawback is that downloading the PDF onto a website brings with it a lot of extraneous material (mostly at the top) that you’ll have to scroll past. AD Week 1307, replace one letter in a word with one other letter to make a new word. wapo.st/invite1307 / Archive Week 1308, cartoon captions, or explain what’s wrong with the picture. wapo.st/invite1308 / Archive Obviously I won’t have space to run many of these — but do need to run some picture. Weeks 1309 and 1310, last year’s retrospective contests, and Week 1311, the predictions for 2019, aren’t part of this week’s contest. Week 1312, Tour de Fours: neologisms including the letter block T-O-U-R in any order. wapo.st/invite1312 / Archive Because of their short form, this and other neologism contests often see ink in the redos. Week 1313, obit poems. wapo.st/invite1313 / Archive Remember that these still need to be about people (animals, etc.) who died in 2018. (This column also has the results of last year’s retrospective contest.) AD ADVERTISING Week 1314, “joint legislation” combining names of two new members of Congress. wapo.st/invite1314 / Archive Week 1315, crossword clues. We published a filled-in grid, you write the clues. One clue is one entry. wapo.st/invite1315 / Archive Week 1316, bogus trivia that cites statistics. wapo.st/invite1316 / Archive Week 1317, Punku — haiku containing a pun. wapo.st/invite1317 / Archive Week 1318, anagrams that are not just someone’s name. wapo.st/invite1318 / Archive Week 1319, coin words found in any of the given seven-letter ScrabbleGrams “racks” wapo.st/invite1319 / Archive The words don’t have to use all seven letters; see this week’s example of Danielle Nowlin’s MEDDLR. Week 1320, Questionable Journalism. Find a sentence in print or online dated Dec. 12-23 and follow it with a question that the sentence could answer. These work best when readers can guess what the original sentence was about so that they can enjoy how it’s being placed in a different context. (This is true of bank heads as well.) wapo.st/invite1320 / Archive AD Week 1321, creative reviews of mundane products listed on Amazon. This year we featured seven items including binder clips, a vegetable peeler and a block of Velveeta. wapo.st/invite1321 / Archive Week 1322, problematic inventions. Jeff Contompasis’s winner was Braille alphabet soup. wapo.st/invite1322 / Archive Week 1323, take one or more letters off the beginning and/or end of a movie title and describe the new movie. This was a hugely popular contest. wapo.st/invite1323 / Archive Week 1324, write a scene from a Bible story, classic myth or folk tale as someone else would write it. There was a 75-word limit, but I encourage even more brevity this time around. wapo.st/invite1324 / Archive Week 1325, jokes for the White House correspondents’ dinner, which did away with a standup comic this year. Don’t pretend you’re still in the spring of 2019 and submit jokes that would be out of date by now. I guess you could assume that the president would actually attend this time, and have him deliver the joke. wapo.st/invite1325 / Archive AD Week 1326, foal names derived from “breeding” any two names on a list of 100 Triple Crown nominees. This is our most heavily entered contest, with around 4,000 entries, and there are always many that are robbed of ink. Here’s a second chance. wapo.st/invite1326 / Archive Week 1327, bank heads. Find any headline in an article or ad dated Dec. 12-23 and reinterpret it by following it with a bank head, or subtitle, that gives it a new meaning or comments wryly. See my note at Week 1320. wapo.st/invite1327 / Archive Week 1328, same as 1324 except that you use a story with a known author. wapo.st/invite1328 / Archive Week 1329, Shakespeare tailgaters. Choose a line by Shakespeare and pair it with a line of your own to produce a funny rhyming couplet. This was another hugely successful contest with lots of great entries that didn’t get ink the first time around. wapo.st/invite1329 / Archive AD Week 1330, “grandfoals.” “Breed” any two foal names that got ink that week. Because many of those names already have puns, this contest is a bit harder than Week 1326. wapo.st/invite1330 / Archive Week 1331, move material around from one sentence to another. I’m going to advise against trying this contest, because it requires a lot of description, but if you can do it elegantly, go for it. wapo.st/invite1331 / Archive Week 1332, acrostic limericks. The first letters of the five lines spell out a relevant word or name. Not suprisingly, this was a very challenging contest. wapo.st/invite1332 / Archive Week 1333, homophone neologisms. Invent a new word or phrase that has a word that sounds like an existing word, but is spelled differently. Beverley Sharp’s runner-up that week was “No-it-all”: A cranky toddler. wapo.st/invite1333 / Archive AD So there’s lots to use here. Please remind me which contest each entry is for, by the week number and a few words of description. And I guess you know what we’ll be doing next week. O that I might gaze upon thy visage! Loser Post-Holiday Party, Saturday, Jan. 11 While I make the final adds to the Evite mailing list, you can mark your calendars and book your plane/train/camel/carpet now for Saturday evening, Jan. 11, for the 21st annual Loser Post-Holiday Party, which we’re having for the fourth straight year at the gracious and spacious and Metro-convenient home of Losers Steve Langer and Allison Fultz. It’s a mostly uncoordinated potluck, with general schmoozing broken up with a singalong of Loser-penned parodies, accompanied on piano by Loser Steve Honley, and perhaps a game led by Loserfest Pope Kyle Hendrickson. It’s a relaxed, perhaps disappointingly sedate evening that gives us a chance to meet and chat with the people who write the funny. Even if you’ve never gotten ink in the Invitational — or even if you’re just a fan who’s never entered — we’d love to have you. AD For the Evite, I’m going with the lists I used for last year’s winter party and this past summer’s Flushies, minus people I’ve invited repeatedly but never expressed interest in attending — plus people who are (a) local and (b) have gotten ink in the past couple of months, and even people who are (a) local and (b) have entered a few times and almost gotten ink. If you’d like to get the Evite — which is how we can keep a head count and can notify you with any updates — and you think you might not make my list otherwise, please email me at pat.myers@washpost.com and ask me to add you. (Don’t, like, put it at the bottom of your Invite entry; I won’t see it in time.) The word is that the weather will be unseasonably clear and mild on the evening of Jan. 11. Whew. LOL through the house*: The results of Week 1358 *Non-inking headline by Jesse Frankovich, who just might be clever and/or funny AD Using the 1823 version of Clement Clark Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas” — popularly known as “The Night Before Christmas” as a word bank contest in Week 1358 presented some real challenges — among them the absence of “is” and “she” — but as almost always happens, the Loser Community met them with creative resourcefulness, often laugh-out-loud humor, and, well, dirty minds. (If you’re not at all bothered by seeing a delightful family poem turned into Stormy Daniels Describes Her Encounter in Frank Terms, then you can scroll to the very bottom of this column and see that and other unprintable entries. If you are at all bothered, simply do not read that far.) Thanks once again to Gary Crockett for validating the entries; without the computerly help of Gary and, in some earlier contests, Kyle Hendrickson, I simply wouldn’t be able to run this contest, to catch that someone (i.e., Sarah Walsh) used the ineligible “take” in a hilarious rant about Christmas decorations put up too early, saying, “Thistle be the night I take them down!” I ran just 22 entries (fewer fit on the print page) because you sometimes have to puzzle them out. Still, the inking entries read far more like normal English than many of the non-inking ones — it’s a real achievement to write in natural syntax with such a limited list of words. Not surprisingly for a contest that takes so much effort, the inking Losers this week consist of a list of Usuals, if you count the New but Clearly has Caught the Invite Bug Ms. Walsh. Duncan Stevens, fresh off a stellar week of song parodies, adds yet another Lose Cannon to his oversize arsenal, while runners-up Brendan Beary, Jeff Shirley and even rookie Sam Mertens are same-old in the Losers’ Circle. What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood was partial to Stephen Dudzik’s bit about the reindeer who goes to an “A. A.” meeting; Jesse Frankovich’s poem about the impeachment hearings; Brendan Beary’s looking too long at a breast and being scolded, “My eyes are appear”; and Tom Witte’s headline for the results, “The Wizards of 'Twas.” Remembering Loser (Becky Fisher, Madison, Wis.) Becky Fisher, right, and her best friend Kathy El-Assal, left, meeting up with fellow Loser Diane Wah on a visit to the Seattle area this past summer. (Courtesy Kathy El-Assal) Becky Fisher, right, and her best friend Kathy El-Assal, left, meeting up with fellow Loser Diane Wah on a visit to the Seattle area this past summer. (Courtesy Kathy El-Assal) I was greatly saddened this week to learn of the death of eight-time Loser Becky Fisher, best friend and neighbor of longtime Loser Kathy El-Assal; they lived just a mile apart in the Madison, Wis., area. They met in graduate school — Kathy’s a librarian, Becky a linguist and ESL instructor — 45 years ago. Kathy introduced Becky to the Invitational, and a few years back, they both joined us at a Loser brunch in Northern Virginia when they came to Washington for the Cherry Blossom Festival. I’m glad to have met them in person. In fact, I’d hoped to see them again when my husband and I were visiting Madison this past summer for a friend’s wedding. But neither was in town: Kathy and Becky had taken a trip, together, to Seattle, where they’d gone on an earlier vacation — and were visiting with another Loser. “Becky loved to travel, so we took two last trips before her cancer progressed,” Kathy told me — and for the second time, they met up with Diane Wah, whom they’d gotten to know from the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook group. “She was the outgoing people person to my more introverted sidekick,” says Kathy, “so my world was enlarged by her being in it.” Here’s Becky’s Invite oeuvre. She was clearly an ace at horse names, but dabbled in some other contests as well. Our Invite world is enlarged by her being in it. Week 1020, 2013, grandfoals: Chris Christie x Burning Sensation = Chris Crispy Week 1070, 2014, grandfoals: YouCanKeepYourPlan x Pi Rho = Backfire Week 1122, 2015, foals: Big Ben x Far From Over = 2B Continued Week 1271, 2017, combined businesses: Italian restaurant/funeral parlor: Pastaway Trump boutique/apiary/landscape service: Ivanka-Bee-A Lawn Week 1274, 2017, foals: Alpha to Omega x Dunk = Absorba the Greek Week 1330, 2019, grandfoals Laughing Gash x Shivalry = Mock the Knife And Week 1333, 2019, neologisms that are homophones of an existing word: Plaiditude: A hoary maxim about Scots, like “Kilt is what happened to the last person who called it a skirt.” See what was the matter: Unprintables from Week 1358 “Lots of interesting words to play with in there,” noted Jesse Frankovich when he suggested using “The Night Before Christmas” as a word bank contest: “brains, breast, cheeks, finger, hurricane, jerk, mamma, opening, spite, wall, to name a few.” Yup. Not to mention “hung” and “head,” which figure prominently among this week’s many unprintable passages, some of them very clever but. Here are a few. Note: If you don’t think crudity about bodies and sex is funny, please stop reading now! — Hurricane-Vixen [a.k.a. Stormy] knew a plump jerk. “He called me a droll broad. He was pawing my breast, then he tore my clothes and sash. I was happy to dash objects on his back-dimples. Then I saw him mount; he came so quick, so rapid!” “Hung?” “All I saw of him — nose, and more — was little, tiny, miniature.” (Duncan Stevens, who, it turns out, used “saw” once too often anyway.) [A selection of old-timey parlance for “Grab her by the p***y”:] Twist up the whistle. Laying a finger on her cherry. Stirring the bowlful of jelly. Twinkling the rose bed. Pawing the dimples. Jerk the kerchief. (Sarah Walsh) The lustre [took me a minute to understand this as a homophone] laughed that he settled his mouth on them and they just went with it — nothing was an obstacle. He would even finger a broad by the opening! (Jesse Frankovich) When a wild vixen dressed in nothing but her stockings bound me to the bed, I was so turned on that my happy little pipe sprang straight up! (Jesse Frankovich) “I saw what he had down there,” the tarnished vixen laughed. “He was hung like a tiny stump. All the while, I was wondering how it came to be that I was there in bed with him. I was just happy that it was so quick.” (Jesse Frankovich, who did also get his usual four blots of ink with printable entries) To St. Nicholas — what I would like for Christmas: To be hung like a reindeer. … To be nestled snug in bed, with night-long visions of my Wall … and with a broad giving good head. To dash the hopes of the old, and twist all Care away from them. To top it all, snow twinkling on the White House lawn, and a Merry Christmas to Myself, and to Me! (Brian Allgar) Vixen was wondering how Donder was hung. Like a mouse? Like a chimney? Like a stump? There was nothing to see; it was all nestled in long reindeer fur. (Gary Crockett) With a wild vixen/ In bed: In, out, in out, in— / White jelly — too quick! (Tom Witte — one in a long list of haiku along the same line) The pack of toys flew down the chimney and right on top of the children below. Heads open, their brains looked like jelly. Dasher shouted. Nick turned around. Comet threw up. (Neal Starkman) This one hits my ban on graphic violence, especially against children. Yecch. The night a plump pedler of tarnished vixen whistled up his team, I had a vision of snug stockings, beds, toys and laying. I shook my tiny stump with wild, rapid jerk. My plums came! And a tarnished kerchief. (Chris Damm) Okay, boys and girls. Watch for the Evite and to all a good week.