Style Conversational Week 1437: We’re emerging!
The Style Invitational Empress on this week’s new contest and results, and the Losers’ resumed 'social engorgements"
Image without a caption
John Hurt and emerging li'l monster in the “chestburster” scene from the 1979 movie “Alien.” In Style Invitational Week 1433, Loser Steve Honley saw the sentence in the paper "“It really has to come from within” and wrote the question “What lesson does the crew in the 'Alien' spaceship learn the hard way?” (20th Century Fox)
By 
Pat Myers
May 22, 2021 at 1:37 p.m. EDT

Add to list
Before we talk about this week’s contest and results, I wanted to share some good if still tentative news: It seems that we can wipe the dust off the calendar of Our Social Engorgements: an eventual return of our monthly Loser Brunches and, most noteworthy, the Flushies — our annual summer awards lunch and singalong. We’re looking at, probably, UPDATED ON MAY 22: SATURDAY, SEPT. 18, rather than the hotter “Saturday afternoon in July sometime after the Fourth,” at the house-on-acreage of Loser Sam Mertens and his family, near New Hampshire Avenue in the outer reaches of Silver Spring (but still just 12 miles or so north of the Beltway).

The Mertenses were all set to host a Loser brunch in April 2020, as a dry run for the Flushies that June. He was going to be crowned Loser of the Year, too! But then, you know.

Now they’re vaccinated, we’re vaccinated. (Their kids aren’t vaccinated but repeatedly have tested negative at their school.) And we can be mostly outdoors, weather permitting. Grand Loser Vizier (I just made that one up) Elden Carnahan took a look at Chez Mertens last year and deemed it eminently Flushiesworthy. If you’d like to help work up songs — we’ll be honoring Sam as well as the new Loser of the Year Jonathan Jensen — or help with other aspects of planning, contact elden [dot] carnahan [at] gmail [dot] com, and we’ll get a group together on Facebook so we don’t have 200 emails going on. I’ll let you know which date to save as soon as possible. I’d think it’d be fine for unvaccinated kids to come if they’re masked.

A screechy bug in the ointment — but it’s not a biggie
Currently, the entry form for Week 1435, the contest to make funny art with at least one real cicada or nymph casing — is not transmitting photos properly. As of May 19, I’ve contacted everyone who submitted photos and asked them to send them instead by email attachment at pat.myers@washpost.com, along with something like “MY CICADA ENTRY” in the subject line. I’ve also put this notice in the entry form itself, and I’ll take it back out if the problem gets fixed. Also include whatever text you want to accompany your photos, as well as your postal address, if you’d like me to send you a prize.


If you’re just sending alternative headlines and subheads, you can send them through the form in the usual way. Do note that you haven’t sent photos, so I won’t be worried that they’re missing.

Last week’s cold snap made me worry that we might have to extend the submission deadline because the cicadas’ emergence was delayed, but now it’s 90 degrees in Washington and it shouldn’t be hard to score a few of the guys. (Please try to use already deceased ones, or the casings; I’m seeing them all over my neighborhood’s streets.)

Fat-fingered fun: The Week 1437 neologism contest
I’m always looking for some new way to trot out yet another chance to make up words based on other words and thus metastasize the Loser Lexicon even further. and so I was intrigued by the “typo” parameters that Hadn’t Been Heard From Since Week 62 Gabe Goldberg suggested: to add or substitute a letter that’s adjacent on a standard keyboard to the pertinent letter. And for Week 1437 I tossed in the option to double the letter, since that’s also in the “typo” realm. Gabe included a good example, but I’ll let him send it in for the contest.

ADVERTISING


“This is a GREAT idea for a contest,” exulted our cartoonist Bob Staake, who, to understate the case, does not usually adore the ideas I send him. In fact, he soon produced a list of examples, including today’s “hurrito.”

(Some of Bob’s clever but thoroughly uncartoonable ideas: Po’goy — a shellfish-free sandwich popular in New Orleans’s Jewish Quarter; F’artagnan — The original Fourth Musketeer who didn’t make the “cut”; “Bone With the Wind”: “Frankly, my dear, I have no desire to [redacted] on a breezy day.”

For other examples, I searched the archives from Elden Carnahan’s Master Contest List and All Invitational Text for neologisms that would work for Week 1437. In addition to the three I used at the top of the contest — Streeptococcus, Goodzilla and Sayonada, I found some other gems:

Hillary Rodham Clingon: The First Lady’s latest hairstyle. It features massive centerline part held in place with black spray paint. (Harold Mantle, from the Invite’s first change-a-letter contest, Week 19 in 1993)


A Place Called Nope: Bill Clinton’s Washington. (Peter A. Molinaro, from that same contest)

It was God’s swill: Rationalization for jumping off the wagon. (Harold Walderman)

Aliass: A body double for a nude scene. (Tom Witte)

Bilk of Rights: The Patriot Act. (Greg McGrew)

Boobboo: A small scar left by breast surgery. (Fred Souk)

Editore: Edited. (Peter Metrinko)

Eohoppus: A prehistoric kangaroo. (Brendan Beary)

Exhillaration: What Monica almost caused in Bill. (Peter Metrinko)

Experdition: The journey to hell. (Martin Bancroft; Mae Scanlan)

Take the money and rub: madam-to-celebrities Heidi Fleiss (Sarah Worcester in a contest to change a quote by one letter)

Coke up and see me sometime: D.C. Mayor Marion Barry (Tom Witte, same contest)

I’m confident that you’ll be able to come up with lots more. Note: None of the examples above include using the word in a funny sentence; that tack is welcome, often earning the ink when several people send in the same general idea.

Question mocks*: The results of Week 1433
*A headline that got ink in 2016 for Kevin Dopart


Our Questionable Journalism contests — first appearing in 1998 — have never failed to produce lots of laughs in its context-switching of sentences from the paper, and the results of Week 1433 keep the streak going gloriously.

As usual, the sentences that worked best for this contest tended to be ones whose real context was clear, or at least not puzzling: You immediately grasp the military context of “The withdrawal is set to begin on Friday and will be completed by May 1,” which makes you laugh even more at Leif Picoult’s “timeline for the final stage of the nonagenarians’ marriage consummation.” Leif, by the way, has been an Invite phenom of late: After her debut in Week 1401 she didn’t ink again for 12 more weeks — but then, boom: Week 1425, Week 1428, three inks in Week 1431 and now again in 1433. Are we looking at the future Rookie of the Year?

Another notable ink-getter of late: Stu Segal blotted up all these inks from the Invite’s earliest days — starting in Week 4, when he was a runner-up, and continuing a run that included two wins and other above-the-fold ink until he suddenly dropped out of Invite-sight after Week 138 in 1995. Then a couple of months ago, I got this note attached to entries for Week 1424: “Hi Pat — I’m back after a 20+ year hiatus (no — not a chronic disease). Unfortunately, I had to spend time at the Will Shortz Clinic for Puzzle Addiction (‘You are the solution !’) and was away from problem-solving for a number of years, colloquially referred to as ’15 down.'


“Back in the day, when The Style Invitational first starting sending out RSVPs, I actually gave the infamous Chuck Smith a run for his money for a time and acquired the concurrent ‘shabby notoriety’ (as your then predecessor called it) that comes from winning several Invitationals.”

Stu got ink that very week, and since then in Week 1426, Week 1427 and now today: “A. I shouldn’t have to be afraid to express myself. Q. Why do you care that you’re not allowed to use USPS as a transportation option?”

Keep it coming, Leif and Stu. And I’d love it if you’d both join the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook, so you’d get to know the Loser Community. And come to the Flushies as well.

And it’s a former phenom, 2019 Rookie of the Year Jon Ketzner, who wins his first Clowning Achievement, and his second Invite win, with his reinterpretation of a line about the Oscar-winning “Nomadland” — “That was Frances McDormand having explosive diarrhea in a plastic bucket on a van” as “Q. What was the worst act on “Celebrity America’s Got Talent”?” Jon’s a pretty salty guy, and for a while he got more ink in the Conversational’s “unprintables” section than in the Invite itself. But he’s figured out that filter, and now he’s up to — aw, wouldn’t you know it — 69 inks.


The rest of the Loser’s Circle are all Usual suspects: Jeff Contompasis and Beverley Sharp are both in the Invite Hall of Fame with well over 500 blots of ink each, and Gary Crockett is just about there with his key card: According to the Loser Stats, Gary’s second place and “And Even Laster” this week bring him up to 496 blots.

What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood singled out Kevin Mettinger’s entry for “This is a moral imperative, an economic imperative. A moment of peril, but also a moment of extraordinary possibilities,” identified as how 10-year-old Bill Clinton asked for lunch money. Doug also especially liked Stephen Dudzik’s about the “fortress of pillows and blankets in the guest room,” how Mrs. Mike Lindell expressed problems in their marriage; Chris Doyle’s about masks repurposed as pantyliners — for a sentence about how the no-longer-needed items are found “in drawers”; John McCooey’s “3,000 chips in a car,” which is what you hear crunching in a minivan — that was my pick among numerous similar “chip” entries — and Duncan Stevens’s “The dude was wrong” as an example of the new way to write appellate court rulings.

Extra-Questionable*: The Unprintables: (*Headline suggested by Duncan Stevens) Among the entries that wouldn’t pass the Style Invitational taste test (or whose writers specifically asked they not be used where decorous people might see them) — but we figure that if you’ve read this far, you know what you’re in for. (If you don’t like bad taste, please stop reading now!)


A: Midway down the shaft, the walls took on a honeycomb pattern, with large shelves carved into them. Q: What were some of the unfortunate side effects of taking Viagra? (John Kammer)

A: The “P,” it goes without saying, is silent. Q: Mitch McConnell, would you say that Marjorie Taylor Greene is the Republican “hope” for the midterm elections? (Kevin Dopart)

A. Make sure you and your partner are on the same page. Q. What’s good advice for a congressional ménage à trois? (Chris Doyle)

A, The doctor’s bag now sits in his closet gathering dust. Q. What became of the surgeon’s berries after the scalpel slipped? (Jon Gearhart)

A. My crawl space is always wet even though I have a dehumidifier and a sump pump down there. Q. What kind of synonyms do embarrassed women use in describing being at Brad Pitt movies? (Chuck Smith)

Uh-huh.