Style Conversational Week 1370: Eek, we printed THAT?
As the Empress redoes a Style Invitational contest we first did in 2000, we look back and shudder

President Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky in a White House photo from 1997. (The White House)
By 
Pat Myers 
Feb. 6, 2020 at 4:45 p.m. EST
This week’s Style Invitational contest, Week 1370, is one that we also did in 2000, 2005 and 2013 (if there were others, I missed them while perusing the Losers’ fabutastic Master Contest List). The challenge is to write something about a person (I guess an animal would be fine as well) using only the letters in the person’s name, as often or seldom as you like. And they produced a lot of clever, funny, ingenious and surprisingly readable work, considering the dearth of letters in some people’s names. (“Cher: Echhh.” — Malcolm Visser)

In fact, in the Invite 10th-anniversary retrospective in March 2003, the Czar of The Style Invitational proclaimed the winner of the 2000 contest “the best entry of all time”:

Monica Lewinsky: Well, I was, like, a woman, y’know. William was, y’know, like, a man. So I’m, like, so lonely. Willie is, like, well, Willie. Anyway, a wink, some skin, “lookie lookie,” we make some nookie. Willie says, “Nice melons.” I mean, like, wow! Willie was mine, I was Willie’s. No one knew! So I’m, like, seein’ Willie, only slyly. Anyways, I’m, like, callin’ Lin. So we yak 'n' yak. I’m like, well, me 'n' Willie, y’know? Lin’s like, “Wow, Willie?” So I say, “Yes, Willie.”

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Anyway, now Lin knows. Once I was, like, “Lin, is a click on my line?” Lin says, “A click? No.” Well, as we all know now, a click WAS on my line. Now, Ken comes in. Now I’m, like, NEWS! Monica mania! I’m, like, a mess. Ken is, like, so asinine. Ken was on a mission. Ken is, like, soooooo my enemy! Lin was so sneaky. Lin is a swine. Oink oink. Willie? Well, I say Slick Willie will owe someone some alimony. Me? Well, now I’m, like, a well-known woman. Now I can make me some money. Way cool. Awesome. (Richard Grossman, McLean, Va.)

Twenty years later, I still think that’s a terrific entry: Not only did it read smoothly while excluding more than half the letters of the alphabet, but it was funny, with its Valley Girl patois and its amazingly comprehensive narrative. I can’t condemn either the writer or the judge for speculating that (a) Lewinsky hoped to get rich from her worldwide fame and (b) that she (or anyone) expected the Clintons to get a divorce.

Unfortunately, however, that wasn’t the only inking entry about Monica Lewinsky. There was also this “honorable mention”:

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Monica Lewinsky: I was once a lonely, lowly lass. I look like a moose (I like cannoli, cannelloni, clams, wine, lemon ice …). I was also one easy woman. (I only say “yes.”) I call my “ally.” I say, “My new man is a slimy weasel.” My sly ally sells my news. We make news kinky. Now I am an icon in a comical, classless way. I make millions, so I cancel any claims on clemency.

Twenty years ago (that’s right, fellow boomers, 2000 was not, oh, three years ago), virtually no one in the Mainstream Media Humor Biz — the late-night network talk shows, “Saturday Night Live,” The Style Invitational — would go out onstage or in print with a blatantly racist joke, or one about money-grubbing Jews. Or squint his eyes and do a “Chinaman” shtick. Even, finally — perhaps it took a decade of epidemic deaths — comics laid off the “Bruce” jokes. But oh boy, Monica Lewinsky didn’t get the slightest restraint, let alone compassion, including from feminists. The 22-year-old intern was “a moose,” an “easy woman,” out to sleep her way to millions for her part in almost bringing down that vulnerable, silly ol’ President of the United States with her slutty, scheming wiles.

It wasn’t till her 2014 essay in Vanity Fair magazine and her TED Talk the next year — if you’re not one of the 16 million people who’ve seen this video, I hope you’ll find 23 minutes — that a chastened public hung its head in shame over its vicious treatment of Monica Lewinsky. Since then numerous comics and pundits — David Letterman and John Oliver among them — have apologized for the cheap digs of those years.

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But still, this very week, Harvey Weinstein’s defense attorney portrayed her client as the victim of a series of fame-hungry young women who took advantage of his weakness of will to agree to give him sexual favors when he demanded them.

There’s still a lot of humor to be found out there, people. Even if you show some decency.

Here are links to the full sets of results of the three previous contests; scroll down past that week’s new contest to see the inking entries. The lengths of the entries that got ink in those contest are all fine for Week 1370 as well. Note: Make sure that your entry doesn’t have any ineligible letters! A low-tech but effective way is to print it out, then cross out, one by one, all the times that the first letter of the name appears; then do it with the second letter and so on. Or, on your computer: do a search-and-replace, letter by letter; replace the letter with an asterisk or another character and see if there’s anything left.

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Week 341 (a.k.a. VIII; don’t ask), 2000

Week 617, 2005

Week 1009, 2013

RIAL and error*: The results of Week 1366
*Non-inking honorable-mentions subhead by Jesse Frankovich

After 16 years of this, the Royal Consort knows to be skeptical when I’m sitting there judging a contest at home, buried in a pile of printouts or sunk into the laptop, and I groan out, in succession: “Oh, these are TERRIBLE. No, really! This time, there’s, like, nothing! … Ugh, what on earth were they thinking? … Well, I’m sure they did the best they could — obviously I put up an unworkable contest. … Oh, well, I’ll fill the page with a big photo …”

This was me all weekend as I plowed through Week 1366. The neologisms featuring the letter block LIAR (in any permutation) were often close to unreadable; the descriptions, page after page, read like clauses in a contract, or were two words long, or had no discernible joke. All of them — well, except the ones that were good.

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And it’s not until I sifted out the gobs of mud from my pan of well over 1,000 entries, and gathered the few nuggets that remained, that I realized that, hmm, these sort of glitter. And actually, huh, there are almost 50 of them. It doesn’t matter how much mud there was.

And ding! Once again we expand the Loser Lexicon by more than 40 words by 25 Losers. Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood even commented that there were a lot of especially good entries this week.

It’s the second Lose Cannon and 89th blot of ink for Bill Dorner and “flopularity,” while Gary Crockett makes his 51st trip to the top-four Losers’ Circle and Jeff Contompasis his sixty-fifth. And his runner-up plus an honorable mention, Loser Steve Honley crosses the 100-ink mark, ensuring that he’ll receive a Sharpie-personalized roll of toilet paper at this summer’s Flushies awards (which will probably be June 13 or 14) to commemorate the accomplishment.

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What Doug Dug: “A lot of good ones, really,” Ace allowed. He singled out Steve’s “Corialonus” as bowdlerized Shakespeare, Bill’s “flopularity,” Mark Raffman’s “Bail-a-ruse” as the place where Carlos Ghosn went; Steve Dudzik’s “cigarlic” as a flavor that wouldn’t even be flopular; and Kel Nagel’s “Starli” as Kellyanne Conway’s unicorn name.

Starting next Thursday: Same email, different sender — sign up now!
The email that I’ll be sending out on Thursday, Feb. 6 — the moment after I finish this column — will be the last “newsletter” for the Invitational/Conversational that’s sent by The Washington Post; for administrative reasons, The Post is cutting back on its newsletters, from around 60 to 40, and the Invite’s was one of the smallest in circulation, with about 10,000 recipients, and only a small fraction of those actually opened it. But not to worry! You can still get your weekly announcement every Thursday afternoon complete with links to the week’s new Invite and Convo; I’ll just be sending it myself.

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Just sign up by clicking here: tinyletter.com/TheEmpress, and you’ll get virtually the same email as before, beginning Thursday afternoon, Feb. 13. And you can unsubscribe just as easily, if you’d like to hurt my feelings. It doesn’t ask you for any personal data, even your name. (Which means I won’t even know who you are from my list, unless it’s clear from your email address — feel free to drop me a line and tell me you joined, especially if we haven’t met!)

It turns out that I can also add names myself to the Tiny Letter list, and so I’ll continue to do that — just as I did for the Post mailing list — for new Invitational entrants, who, I figure, will want to be notified when the results run for the contest they entered. Once again, unsubscribing is a breeze.

If you sign up and you’re told that you already are signed up? I must have added your name, probably because I couldn’t bear the thought that you — especially you — might not hear from me. I do hope to find time to add the names of longtime newsletter recipients, in case they didn’t hear this news. Since I announced this news last Thursday way down in the lower part of the Conversational, I’ve already gotten a stream of sign-ups from addresses I don’t recognize — I was surprised and truly touched to learn that people beyond the core Loser Community read this thing!

And if you want to see the Invite even sooner, join the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook; I usually share the Invite around 10 a.m. on Thursdays, before I get down to writing the Conversational.