Style Conversational Week 1375: Quipped from the headlines
The Empress of The Style Invitational discusses this week’s contest and results
Once again we had a bounteous crop of neologisms from our contest using ScrabbleGrams “racks.” The Empress reviews them later in this column.  
Once again we had a bounteous crop of neologisms from our contest using ScrabbleGrams “racks.” The Empress reviews them later in this column.
By 
Pat Myers 
March 12, 2020 at 4:27 p.m. EDT
Hello from the Empress’s domicile, Mount Vermin! Hooray for remote publishing! Actually, I almost always publish The Style Invitational from home on Thursdays; I usually go downtown to the Washington Post newsroom only on Tuesdays to mail prizes, make printouts, etc. But everyone at The Post who doesn’t require special equipment has been asked to stay home for the rest of March.

The only way this should affect you as a Loser is if you’re a super-successful one: The next three weeks of second-place prizes — the “Meh” cuff links, the George H.W. Bush family paper doll book, and, ironically, the body-fluid medical cleanup kit — are ensconced in my desk downtown. So John Hutchins’s French cuffs, if he has any, will have to remained un-mehed for a few more weeks after he scored them this morning with his neologism “airpat” (for what Biden is being encouraged to do these days instead of hugs, shoulder squeezes, etc.). Also, I’d rather not ship the runner-up Loser mugs until I can do it from the office at the beginning of April (I hope!); I can do the Grossery Bags and probably the Lose Cannons from home. If you’re getting a magnet or Fir Stink, you’ll get it more or less on the regular schedule. With an interesting postage stamp!

Bank regulations: Guidelines for this week’s contest
Our perennial Mess With Our Heads contest, in which you write a bank headline, or subtitle, that humorously interprets a real headline published over the next 12 days, has morphed a bit in various ways since I ran the first one in 2004 — but the drill’s exactly the same as it was last year, and the year before.

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And so I’m going to send you right over to Style Conversational Week 1327, from last April, which in turn signals Week 1269, and guess what that one does? And instead I’ll share some classic bank heads from over the years.

If you don’t subscribe to The Post — and you absolutely should, especially since a digital subscription costs half what the New York Times does, and (unlike the NYT) it includes recipes and crosswords — the links to the Conversationals probably won’t work for you. So below are some FAQs I copied from the earlier Convos, with a few references to this year’s dates and examples.

What counts as a headline? In a nutshell, it’s anything above the text of an article or ad, as well as a one-line link to another article, as on the paper’s home page. [You may also use a bank head itself as your headline.]

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Do I have to use every word in the headline? No, but the section you do use can’t mean something hugely different on its own [“City Passes Out Supplies to Residents” can’t become “City Passes Out”], and you can’t string together unconnected parts of the headline.

Can I change the punctuation or capitalization in the headline?

You can’t change the punctuation.

For capitalization, you can in the following case: If the headline, like The Post’s current heads, is “downstyle” (capitalized like a sentence rather than a title) and there’s a proper name in the hed that you’d like to reinterpret as a plain ol’ common noun (say “Accord” as an agreement rather than a Honda), then you can write the whole head as upstyle, as in a book title. If the head is upstyle to begin with, then just leave it that way.

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Can I use the headings that appear in other online stuff besides newspapers? You can if it has a date on it and it falls within the required window [March 12-23]. Very helpful to me: Copy the URL (website address) and put it underneath your entry (or at the bottom of the whole submission). DO NOT EMBED IT into the headline itself; I’ll see a bunch of garble.

One more thing: Sometimes online headlines are ephemeral, especially on a publication’s home page; if it no longer exists, I’ll rely on your honor. But don’t rewrite headlines to make them work for your joke; remember: honor. I can’t check every last headline.

Blue-chip banks: Classic headlines from past years
One from each year from 2004 through 2016.

Compelling Body of Art / Simon Explains Real Reason for Reunion With Garfunkel (Michelle Stupak, 2004, winner of the first Mess With Our Heads contest)

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Ravens Just Miss / Attempt to Rap on Chamber Door; Instead Crash Into Window (Jonathan Guberman, 2005)

‘It Felt Like a Good Place to Start a Family’/ Couple Arrested for Lewd Conduct at Mattress Store (Jane Auerbach, 2006)

American’s Dream Comes True /Man, 37, Shows Up Naked and Totally Unprepared for Meeting (Michael Levy, 2008)

Obama Defends New Tack in Afghanistan/ Says Geneva Convention Technically Bans Only Thumbscrews (Peter Metrinko, 2009)

Saudis may get huge arms deal / Landmark ‘oil for spinach’ accord signed (Elden Carnahan, 2010 winner)

‘Thanks for bringing him home’/ Nats fan expresses gratitude for rare RBI (Jeff Contompasis, 2011, before the Washington Nationals became good)

Obama reaches out to middle-class voters in Colorado/ GOP accuses president of ‘inappropriate touching’ (David Genser, 2012)

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Arkansas offers tourists a much-needed escape/ Thousands accept, flee back to home states (Frank Osen, 2013)

Five interesting things about the Maryland lieutenant governor debate/ Okay, we did have to make up three of them (Bird Waring, 2014)

Carly Fiorina subdued in victory lap after debate / Police allege “she looked black” (Stephen Litterst, 2015)

The ugliest, most appalling spectacle in American politics / Remembering Rick Perry’s ‘smart glasses’ (Todd DeLap, 2016)

Here are links to some whole sets of results; scroll or jump down past that week’s new contest if necessary. They’re all hilarious reads. The PDFs are not behind the paywall but require some scrolling.

Results of Week 1327, 2019: Post page; PDF of Web page

Results of Week 1269, 2018: Post page; PDF of Web page.

Results of Week 1191, 2016: Post page; PDF of Web page

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Results of Week 987, 2012: Post page; plain-text version

Har Scrabble*: The results of Week 1371
*Winning headline from 2015, by Osen/Dopart/Doyle; I don’t want to use up a non-inking entry that might be used next time

“Too many to name!” That was the reply of Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood when I asked him this morning for his favorite entries this week for the seventh running of The Tile Invitational, our contest for finding new words in ScrabbleGrams racks (taken from the old “Big Book of ScrabbleGrams”). Now, Doug was running about 18 hours late with the Invite after I failed to get it to him yesterday before he finished work, and so maybe he was brushing me off in the most gracious way. But it was a very good week; it was hard for me to trim my list to “only” 39 entries. (Thanks to Alex Blackwood, my co-admin in the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook group, for reading my shortlist and helping me make those final cuts.)

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Even with 45 seven-letter sets to choose from — and the words could also be six or five letters — there was a bit of duplication of neologisms, including the eventual winner, “Hersay,” and also “pre-MAGA,” “map rage,” “sharey,” “nanabod,” “claaaps,” “batmon,” among others. But the majority of today’s inking entries were unique words. Thanks to all but a couple of people [sighs] for formatting the entries as I’d asked — starting with the letter set, then the neologism, then the definition on the same line. This let me sort the list alphabetically, line by line, and end up with all the entries from a single set bunched together.

Great timing for Lose Cannon winner Duncan Stevens, who submitted his “hersay” entry — "“19 women have accused me of harassment? That’s just hersay” — on Feb. 24. Just yesterday, of course, a similar argument by Harvey Weinstein was roundly rejected by the judge, who sent him away for 23 years. Likewise, John Hutchins’s “airpat” developed a second layer of meaning during this coronavirus crisis. Jonathan Jensen’s “pre-MAGA” definition — “Back when you could still talk to your brother-in-law at Thanksgiving” — was my favorite among several. And it’s the first trip to the Losers’ Circle (10th ink in all) for rookie Marli Melton for her imaginative example of “unblame.”

Off the Rack: Unprintables from Week 1371:

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I actually was going to run NADPAL as the male equivalent of “bosom buddies,” but too many people had the same idea! But here are a few that wouldn’t have flown; some were designated “Convo only” by their writers. AADILWY > WAYLAID: Completely f***ed! (Jon Gearhart)

ABELMNU > LUBEMAN; AADELMR > REAMLAD: Proctologists by day, crime-fighting duo by night. (Jeff Shirley)

EIMNOOS > — IN SOME: What fits “You ..., you ooze some” — the inside of a Hallmark card for getting an STD. (Sam Mertens)

And finally, from Hildy Zampella (!!): NANABOD: Attribute of a GILF. Hildy is not yet a nana, and therefore has not yet received her GILF card. But when ...