Style Conversational Week 1363: Another mulligan stew
The Empress of The Style Invitational discusses this week’s contest and results
From our Week 1328 contest to write something in the style of another writer. That's one of 24 contests from the first half of the past year that you can enter or reenter in Week 1362, at wapo.st/invite1362. Deadline is Monday, Dec. 23, 2019. (Poem by Robert Schechter; design and illustration by Valerie Holt)
From our Week 1328 contest to write something in the style of another writer. That's one of 24 contests from the first half of the past year that you can enter or reenter in Week 1362, at wapo.st/invite1362. Deadline is Monday, Dec. 23, 2019. (Poem by Robert Schechter; design and illustration by Valerie Holt)
By 
Pat Myers 
Dec. 19, 2019 at 4:30 p.m. EST
Here we go again, looking back on the past year. Last week (in a contest that’s still running through Monday, Dec. 23) we offered a chance to enter or reenter 24 Style Invitational contests from the first half of the past year; now, in Week 1363, we can retract the zoom lens a bit to revisit the 24 contests beginning with Week 1334 and going all the way to the “air quotes” contest whose results run this week.

The links below are to The Post’s own pages; since they’re no more than a few months old, they should be complete. Remember that the entry form is for this week’s contest, wapo.st/enter-invite-1363, not the ones specified in those pages (I’ve deactivated those old forms, but just in case it lets you in …). Remember to check the results of that contest (from four weeks down the list) to make sure that you’re not sending me the same joke that already ran.

If you’re not a Post subscriber, you won’t be able to click on more than one or two of the links below. I truly believe that if you’re an American — and especially one in the D.C. area — you owe it to yourself to take advantage of the extensive, expensive high-quality journalism that The Post creates, especially while it’s offering a big discount on an online subscription — just $40 for the first year (and just $100 a year otherwise; I pay $200 for the New York Times). I guarantee that your government isn’t interested in providing this information for you. Plus, you know: Style Invitational.

AD
But for those who can’t or won’t subscribe, there’s another way to see the contests: Go to NRARS.org, the Losers’ website, and click on “Master Contest List,” which contains a link to every Invite since Week 1, in one form or other (usually several). Scroll down to Week 1334 and later, and click on the icon that’s a little cartoon. That is a PDF of The Post’s online page, which Keeper of All of This Elden Carnahan maintains in case The Post’s page disappears or gets messed up. On this you’ll see a sort of low-rent (typographically) version of The Post’s page, with some extraneous material that you’ll have to scroll past. But everything you need will be there.

The online form for sending your entries is not behind The Post’s paywall, so you don’t need to be a subscriber to enter (or send a letter to the editor, or other things you send through an online form).

Okay, here’s the handy-dandy list for Week 1363. Please read the actual instructions for the contests; these thumbnails often omit important elements.

AD
(Remember that the contest that covers first half of the year, Week 1362, is still running, though Monday, Dec. 23; see last week’s Conversational, wapo.st/conv1362, for the equivalent list.)

Week 1334: Combine any two words, names, abbreviations, etc., from anywhere in the redacted Mueller report, into a two-word or hyphenated phrase and define it.

Week 1335: Poems featuring words from this year’s National Spelling Bee.

Week 1336: Something you could say in two different situations among the list we provide, such as “at the supermarket” and “in bed.” Basically double-entendres.

Week 1337: Write a Q&A-form joke whose punchline contains an anagram of a word or name that’s relevant to the joke.

Week 1338: Captions for any of four cartoons. (I could well run a cartoon again, online, with the results of Week 1363, but no more than one.)

AD
Week 1339: Song parodies on the theme “modern woes.” This overlaps significantly with the Week 1357 parody contest, but also allows for topics that aren’t really “news.” I always run a parody or two in the retrospective, despite the length, because there are always so many deserving ones.

Week 1340: Slightly change a famous name and describe the resulting personage. This was the most heavily entered contest of the past six months.

Week 1341: Combine two words into a portmanteau beginning in E- through R- in which at least two letters overlap.

Week 1342: Combine two abbreviations into a new entity.

There was no new contest for Week 1343, when the Empress was on a progress through Midwestern Loserdom.

Week 1344: Limericks featuring words beginning with gr-.

Week 1345: Bogus trivia about food and drink.

AD
Week 1346: “Alphabetically balanced” neologisms, in which the first and last letters are equidistant from the two ends of the alphabet, e.g., a-z, b-y, in either direction.

Week 1347: “Reologisms”: A lot of entries come with great new words but meh descriptions; choose one from the list and make your own definition.

Week 1348: Explain how any two items from the provided 16-item list are alike or different.

Week 1349: Look through any issue of the Congressional Record (link provided), choose a sentence, and follow it with a question that it could humorously answer.

Week 1350: Poems featuring one or more words newly added to the dictionary, from a list we supplied.

Week 1351: Timely ideas for Halloween costumes or parties. (If you wore such a costume this year, you can send a photo.)

Week 1352: More double-entendres: Write a steamy-sounding description of a non-steamy event. The original limit was 100 words, but this week’s should be shorter.

AD
Week 1353: Change a word in a movie title to its “opposite,” then describe the new movie. Another contest that drew thousands of entries.

Week 1354: Snake through the provided word-search grid to discover a new term and define it.

Week 1355: Highlight part of a word in “air quotes” and define the word to reflect that context.

Week 1356: Ask Backwards: We give a list of “answers”; you give the questions. (Week 1356 results below Week 1360.)

Week 1357: Song parodies about the news. See Week 1339. (Week 1357 results below Week 1361.)

Week 1358: Write something funny using only words in the poem “A Night Before Christmas.” (Week 1358 results below Week 1362.)

Week 1359: Write a sentence that has an “air quote” that spans two or more words. (See this week’s results.)

Between-the-Holidays Loser Brunch: Dec. 29 in Alexandria, Va.
For the third year running, Loser (Edward Gordon, Austin) will be in the D.C. area for the holidays, and so we’re having a brunch near his hotel in Alexandria, on Sunday, Dec. 29, at noon at Joe Theismann’s Restaurant near the King Street Metro station. Recently renovated, it’s an upscale pub/sports bar. They’ll validate parking in the adjacent garage. RSVP on the Losers’ website, NRARS.org; click on “Our Social Engorgements.”

AD
And we’ve already gotten a number of Yeses from both Invite veterans and newbies for the big do, the Losers’ Post-Holiday Party potluck/songfest, Saturday evening, Jan. 11, in Chevy Chase, Md. If you didn’t get the Evite by mail, here it is expressly for you. I will be wearing, in addition to my standard tiara, a fantastic new piece of headwear courtesy of the Royal Consort’s office gift swap.

Let’s regroup*: Results of the Week 1359 ‘air quotes’ contest
Non-inking headline by Beverley Sharp

To be honest, I didn’t have a lot of confidence in Week 1359, a contest for “air quotes” that spanned two or more words. It wasn’t that challenge per se, but the requirement that the entry was to be a sentence containing the “air quote,” rather than our usual format of Word: Description (optional example). Would the sentences supply some humorous irony? And they were sure not to take up much room on the page. But no problem, I figured: I could always fill with one or more of the fine song parodies that were robbed of ink in Week 1357.

AD
But I ended up with a “shortlist” of some 100 entries, 40 of which get ink this week. I redundantly set off the air quotes with both boldface and quotation marks, to make it clear in both print and on various devices. (The computer and spell check kept trying to “fix” the open-quotes I’d added in the middle of a word; I had to add a space, type in the mark, then delete the space.) The words often take a bit of puzzling out; I hope it proves fun rather than tedious for a reader.

This was a much harder assignment than the regular air quotes contests, in which you just have to find a word inside another word (Week 1355 entrants, didn’t you find yourself seeing air quotes in everything in the following weeks?). And I’m not surprised that all 22 inking Losers were well blotted. It’s the 141st ink, and fifth win, for Matt Monitto, who’s trying to arrange to drive down yet again from Connecticut on Jan. 11 for the Losers’ Post-Holiday Party; I hope to present his Lose Cannon to him there. But the week’s real star has to be runner-up Sam Mertens, who scored six! blots of ink this week, catapulting his total to 39 — and he didn’t even get his first ink until Week 1327, which is almost at the end of the 24 contests reoffered last week. Sam, along with veteran Losers’ Circle veteran Mark Raffman, scores the first of our new Loser Mugs, which I ordered this past Tuesday and are sent to arrive late next week. So I can bring them to the Loser party as well. It’ll be Sam’s first Loser event, though I was happy to meet him in person already for a minute, at a bookstore event.

What Doug Dug: The faves of Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood this week included all four top winners, as well as the “fait ac‘compli, cit’ations from legal cases” by Drew Bennett and the “change, a new direction, and better live‘s. Ame’rica, you can trust me!” by Sarah Walsh — another rookie, whose three inks this week move her way up the charts to nine in all. (Sarah will be at the party, too!)

AD
Speaking of Drew, that’s his joke on the new Loser mug; he got ink with it all the way back in Week 715 (2007) for, duh, a mug-slogan contest. Drew’s mission to both reach 200 inks and get down to 200 pounds continues, though he informs me that Part 2 of that challenge may have to wait till after that huge cruise he and his wife are taking. But he’s now at 192 blots of ink.

One thing that clearly didn’t work was to misspell the word in the quote, like “You look very smart on v”idio, T”rump."

Happy All Your Holidays! And we’ll be back on . . .
Next week’s Invitational will come out as usual on Thursday, though it might be later than usual that day; the question is whether I’ll have everything finished by Tuesday so that Ace Copy Editor Vince Rinehart can read it over. As long as there’s a morning Invite, there can be an afternoon Conversational. (This will all replay in some form for New Year’s.)

In any case, here’s wishing you a happy and healthy and warm and dry rest-of-the-year. Thank you once again for taking part in this crazy thing we keep doing under the banner of an esteemed publication as we look back on 2019 and saunter up to Invite Year 28.