Style Conversational Week 1465: See _____ next year
The Style Invitational Empress on the 2022-prediction contest and eponym results

Not ridden out of town on a rail, alas: Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) was censured by the House for tweeting an anime video that depicted him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez -- a "joke" sarcastically termed "Gosarcasm" by Losers Marty Gold and Lee Graham. Gosar then sent out the tweet again. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Pat Myers
December 2, 2021 at 4:45 p.m. EST



You know, I’m pretty glad that the results of our Year in Preview contest last year did NOT include a prediction that, a few days into the new year, a wanton, murderous mob would invade the Capitol and its legislators with the goal of overturning the 2020 presidential election and maybe hanging the outgoing vice president from a scaffold. Or that almost none of the Republican members of Congress would dare criticize what happened.

They’d have blamed us!

Anyway, let’s give another go to our Year in Preview contest, Style Invitational Week 1465, in which I’ll compile a timeline of Loserly predictions for 2022. Once again, I’ll thank Longtime Loser Malcolm Fleschner not only for the idea, but for supplying some handy-dandy examples — which now he can’t put in his own column.

Malcolm, a Californian whose humor column Culture Shlock used to run in the San Jose Mercury-News and now appears on his blog on Substack, came up with his Year in Preview back in 2004 as a twist on Dave Barry’s famous “Year in Review” pieces — which Dave has been doing since well back into the previous century, mixing his own jokes with actual “I swear I am not making this up” occurrences. Here’s Malcolm’s Year in Preview from last year; here’s Dave’s lengthy Year in Review from 2020 (this year’s will run in The Washington Post Magazine on Dec. 26).


While Dave’s wrap-up is in paragraph form, we’ll copy Malcolm’s Invite-friendly timeline format of individual entries. One source of Dave’s humor is the running jokes he’ll thread throughout the year, like the six progressively sillier “events” involving the Houston Cheating Astros; while a single Loser shouldn’t submit several related jokes expecting them all to run, I hope to be able to place three or more related entries throughout the timeline (by the same or different people) for a similar effect.

Like both versions, the Invite entries should be in present tense. And while I didn’t make a plea for it in the column or this week’s entry form, I hope to be able to shuffle everyone’s entries into one alphabetical list for judging. So to make sure each of your entries stays in one piece, don’t break it up into multiple lines.

NOT LIKE THIS:


Jan. 3:

Something happened.

Also, something else.

BUT LIKE THIS:

Jan. 3: Something happened. Also something else.

I’ll post the results of Week 1465 online Thursday, Dec. 28, but in print they’ll be in the Jan. 2 Arts & Style section. Still, I won’t refuse to run predictions for Jan. 1 — what are people going to say, “Oh no, that didn’t really happen!”? I don’t think I’ll have to run a correction.

In today’s contest I quoted some the inking entries from last year’s Invite Year in Preview; here are all the Week 1414 results (preview of 2021).

And if you’re feeling really nostalgic, here’s our predicted timeline for 2020 (nope, nobody predicted a pandemic) from Week 1361.

Haws with known names:* The eponym neologisms of Week 1461
Non-inking (too long) headline by Chris Doyle

Hoo-boy, will readers 20 years from now — or, in some cases, two years from now if we’re lucky — be furrowing their li’l ol’ brows over the inking eponyms from Week 1461. In a happier world, Rep. Paul Gosar will become a trivia question: “Three siblings of what member of Congress wrote an op-ed calling him an ‘unhinged’ liar and gaslighter and ‘immune to shame’?" (Those were the calmer sentiments.)


But we’re writing for right now, and this week’s words incorporating the names of particular people, or eponyms — almost four dozen of them — formed a long-overdue update of our previous “It’s the Eponymy, Stupid” contest sending up the Names in the News of 1993, 2006 and 2010.

This week’s Clowning Achievement winner is a rookie phenom: Donald Norum got his first blot of ink six weeks ago with a good-idea/bad-idea pairing, one of several inkworthy entries that week.

Good idea: Always handling guns like they’re loaded. Bad idea: Always handling guns like you’re loaded.

And today Don makes a deft analogy for the House minority leader: KevinMcCarthyism: Blacklisting people who agree to appear before a House committee investigating un-American activities. It wasn’t necessary to add “no shame, no decency.”


While Don is new to us, he has an Invite pedigree: His mom, Jean Lightner Norum, was twice a runner-up a full 20 years ago: with a poem about Osama bin Laden, and this item for an underachiever’s list of goals: “Win the admiration of my dog.”

Two of this week’s three runners-up are almost Forever Losers, going back even farther than Jean: Roy Ashley — next in line for the Hall of Fame, with 456 blots of ink — got his first ink in Week 120 in 1995; and Steve Fahey goes back a few months more to Week 104. Steve wins a hat shaped like a pizza (well, it’s a disk with some pepperoni-motif appliqués) for offering two adjectives connoting athletic longevity: “ovechkinetic” and “bradioactive,” while Roy explained that “toobin'” was something done with a tube. (We are so highbrow sometimes that we have to lower it with a face-drop.)

What Doug Dug: The faves of Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood this week included the top winners, plus these from the honorable mentions: Frank Mann’s “manchin,” a property owned by the coal industry; Amanda Yanovitch’s “ahemsworthy,” her second ink in a row involving swooning over a movie star (last time it was a poem laughing about Jason Momoa’s physique being called a “dad bod”); the similar “goscarcasm” entries by Marty Gold and Lee Graham; Greg Dobbins “heehawley” calling Stanford/Yale-educated Sen. Josh Hawley on his bumpkin act; Dave Silberstein’s “young-kins,” alluding to the Virginia governor-elect’s 17-year-old son, who twice (unsuccessfully) tried to vote, perhaps trying (and backfiring) to prove his dad’s contention that polling places were untrustworthy; and Kevin Dopart’s “giulianesty,” which works better when you say it out loud.

Save the date: The Losers’ Post-Holiday Party, Jan. 22
The whole premise of this week’s Year in Preview contest is that we can’t be sure what’s down the road for us. But assuming that our vaccines and boosters will keep us from needing to lock ourselves down against Omicron or whatever other Greek letter, we’ll be having the Losers’ Post-Holiday Party on the evening of Saturday, Jan. 22 — in a new, spacious location: a large party room in the new apartment building of Loser Kathleen Delano in Arlington, Va., close to the Crystal City Metro station. (Kathleen also hosted the 2019 Flushies in the party room of her previous Crystal City building; this is a different one.)


As always, it’ll be a potluck, and with the aid of pianist and 113-time Loser Steve Honley (and possibly others), we’ll sing (or perhaps “sing”) various Loser-penned parodies. The hours for the room would be 5 to 9 p.m., with the singalong getting going around 7:30. The event is put on by the Losers, with no involvement from The Post, except that I’ll send the Evite because I’m the one with y’alls’ email addresses. If you weren’t on the invitation list for the Flushies Awards this past September and you’d like me to add you, email me at pat.myers@washpost.com. But if you’ve found your way to the bottom of a Style Conversational, you’re invited regardless. It’s like the Golden Ticket to Loserdom.

Finally: Have you opted in for the Invite newsletter?

As I’ve mentioned for a few weeks now, I had to get a new host for the once-a-week notification email, or newsletter, that I send out with links to the week’s Invitational and Conversational. This new host company, Substack, is very accommodating, allowing me to load all 1,800 names on my list with a single click. But I had to lie and promise that all the people on the list had signed themselves up, or otherwise asked to be there: It wasn’t true, since I’d added new Losers when they sent in their first entries.


So now I’m asking all those longtime newsletter-getters to email me at myerspat@gmail.com to tell me they do want to stay on the list. Thanks to the hundreds of you who’ve done this so far! If you haven’t yet responded, I’ll try to write to you personally before I cut your name, but to be honest, I might not get to you. So just take two seconds and email me — or just reply to the newsletter you get today.

If you weren’t on the original list, or you’d like to sign up under a new address, just go to TheStyleInvitational.substack.com/about and click on the purple “Subscribe Now” button. It’s all free.