Style Conversational Week 1470: The fixes are in
The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s ‘prefix’ contest and faux-fix results

By Pat Myers
Yesterday at 4:07 p.m. EST



The Washington Post, actually, doesn’t ever “regret the error.” Well, of course it does in its heart — The Post not only takes pride in its accuracy and transparency, but sees it as essential to its credibility — but it figures that you know that. The New York Times feels the same way. Neither paper apologizes when running a correction; it just explains what was wrong and says what’s right.

But given that Week 1466 of The Style Invitational, whose results run today, is a spoof on classic newspaper conventions, I had no problem with entries that “regret” or “apologize,” even if they were supposed to be by The Post.

Like the correction jokes in Week 609 in 2004, the framework accommodated a variety of jokes, including:

— Unfortunate typos — as in runner-up Stephen Gold’s “dear to me” becoming “dead to me”; Mark Calandra’s correction that the beer was “poured in pints,” not “poured in pants”; runner-up John Klayman noting that “for” was left out of “going for broke” in quoting Elon Musk; or Duncan Stevens’s clarifications that “brow jobs” were offered at the spa. Not to mention Dave Airozo setting the record straight that Losers’ prizes would not “be nailed to them,” though they were free to decorate themselves. About a third of this week’s inking entries corrected such typos, but I kept laughing.


Some entries put a twist on the formula. Kevin Dopart’s runner-up noted that the paper had said Sen. Joe Manchin advocated “putting minors back to work” in the coal industry, then clarified that “Sen. Manchin is actually in favor of automation.”

And while at least half a dozen entries clarified that children weren’t really going to “pubic school” or whatever, Peter Jenkins corrected the report that Thomas was accused of putting a “public hair” on Anita Hill’s Coke can.

— The “correction” of a story with some outrageous name-calling or dubious occurrence by focusing on some other little element. Steve Leifer’s comically/sadly long — and almost entirely accurate — list of supporters whom Trump eventually turned on ended with the correction that “Natasha Badenov” is actually “Natasha Fatale.” Terri Berg Smith corrects not the story of an alien spaceship invasion in Montana, but a tiny spelling mistake. Duncan Stevens clarifies that Dan Snyder does not have the charm of a squashed slug, only one-third that amount.


But there were also lots of imaginative other approaches among the 39 inking entries (30 on the print page): Frank Osen helpfully listing the spoilers to the murder mystery; Amanda Yanovitch reporting an objection to the late Mr. Smith being called a contrarian — from the late Mr. Smith; all the way to Milo Sauer’s regret that “the senator who is holding up all climate change legislation makes his living from the coal industry. There is no correction here; we are just sorry.”

I counted 14 entries that played off The Post’s ubiquitous disclaimer that “Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post,” which appears in every article that mentions Amazon and its many offshoots, plus the Blue Origin space company, as well as many articles about their competitors. My obvious favorite — it wins the Clowning Achievement — was Sam Mertens’s regret for omitting the mention in an essay headlined “Bald Is Beautiful.” That’s Sam’s fourth Invite win since his Invite debut less than three years ago, and Ink No. 109 in all.

First Offender Tim Dobbyn, whose entry ran only online because it didn’t fit on the print page — sorry, Tim: I usually put local people’s first ink in the print Invite so they’ll have a souvenir, but it was just too long — dug at some public figures’ tendency to quibble with small problems in a negative story to damage the whole thing’s credibility; as the editor of “the Rusty Bugle” he announces that, okay, he’ll simply print the damaging story all over again, with the quibbles corrected. (By the way, the Supreme Court’s landmark New York Times v. Sullivan ruling establishes that a public figure can’t sue for libel just because of a few minor mistakes in an article. Given Donald Trump’s constant threats, he might not know that.)


One formula didn’t work at all because of illogic, and I got a lot of such entries. “A typographical error indicated that the bagel was topped with locks. That was incorrect. It also had a schmear of cream cheese.” “A Monday editorial noted incorrectly that the House of Representatives found Stephen Bannon in contempt of Congress. He has contempt for all branches of government.” That wouldn’t be noting incorrectly. If I say you have a pet Irish setter, and you do, I’m not noting incorrectly even if you also have a pet iguana.

So what was the biggest mistake I personally made at The Post? It was misspelling a name in a headline on the front page of the Sunday Style section. It was the name of the National Spelling Bee champion. I have suppressed from my memory whether The Post ran a correction.

What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood is back with his faves for the week. Doug singled out Sam’s winner and Kevin’s “minors” runner-up (I’m glad, because another friend I asked didn’t get it) as well as Frank Osen’s about the plot spoilers and Peter Jenkins’s clarification that it was a perfectly sunny day on Jan. 6, 2021, The Post’s motto notwithstanding. But Doug called “great” David MacGregor’s note that “Due to a production error, the same ‘Beetle Bailey’ comic strip has been running for the past 47 years.”


YOU are invited to the Loser party Jan. 22 (if you’re boosted)
If you didn’t get an email Evite to our Losers’ Post-Holiday Party — Saturday, Jan. 22, 5 to 9 p.m., in close-in Crystal City (Arlington), Va. — consider yourself personally invited anyway; anyone who reads The Style Conversational is Loserly enough for us. Here’s the link to the Evite, which you can respond to.


The accompanying message, which tells about the precautions we’re taking so we can get together after skipping last winter’s potluck/parody-fest, asks you to email me a picture of your boostered vaccine card, so we don’t have to ask at the party. It’s going to be a smaller crowd this year, for obvious reasons, and masks are entirely welcome. But it’s also in a spacious party room of an apartment building, rather than the usual cozy space of a Loser’s home.

I’ll be there, along with the Royal Consort, and always eager to meet new Losers and Invite fans, as well as to reconnect with longtime ones. Loser and pianist Steve Honley will be at the keyboard, and Invite Celebrity Duncan Stevens will be choosing the lineup of singalong parodies. If you’re coming and you have a parody you’d like to perform or have performed, contact me and I’ll put you in touch with the Duncster and we’ll see if it’s workable.

I also will bring some gewgaws that, for various reasons, don’t work as Style Invitational second prizes. If there’s a game — like the trivia game that Kyle Hendrickson led at our summer fest, the Flushies, last year — perhaps someone might win the Nose Condom.

Put your best [whatever] forward: This week’s contest, Week 1470
“What, after all, is a prefix? Neither a borrower (A) nor a lender (B). It seems to us — well, me, then — that a prefix may very well be a single letter, but it had better form a syllable. Else it is not the cow we sought. Many of you gave us more than we deserved, adding prefixes to both halves. Forming a hole. While we didn’t rule you out for so doing, neither did we make you monarch.” — Mary Ann Madden, the “we” of the New York Magazine Competition, introducing the results of Competition 830, Oct. 9, 1995


And you thought I wasn’t clear.

Anyway, here’s a contest directly lifted from NYM, brought to our attention by Our Very Own Chris Doyle, who used to be NYM’s Very Own Chris Doyle until that competition folded in 2000 after 973 contests over 31 years (it wasn’t weekly) and Chris turned his wordsmithery toward us. It’s not surprising that Chris remembered this particular contest: He’s all over it. Because Madden or the magazine, for some reason, wanted to maintain the fiction of dozens of different readers getting ink every week (there was officially a one-entry-per-person limit), Chris simply submitted his entries under a huge variety of names. And for Competition 830, of the three first prizes, two of them are really by Chris. And of the three runners-up: All of them. (The third first-place winner is by Bob Kopac, who got 14 blots of Invite ink in the early years.)

We don’t lie here at The Style Invitational, and so (Chris Doyle, Denton, Tex.) just ran up Inks Nos. 2,386 and 2,387 with his honorable mention and headline this week. Plus No. 2,388 for the contest idea and 2,389 and 2,390 with the two examples I cited (unless Keeper of the Stats Elden Carnahan uses another system).


I’m using “prefix” repeatedly in quotes because, technically, a prefix isn’t just any letter or set of letters you tack onto the beginning of a word; really, to quote Merriam-Webster, those letters must “produce a related word or an inflectional form of a word.” So while “non-native” contains a real prefix, “unimagi-native” — like Chris’s “The Return of the Unimaginative” — does only as a joke. And we like jokes.

To judge from the Week 830 results, this might be one of those contests that lean more toward the cerebrally clever than to the gutly funny: more like, “oh, I see — ha, clever” rather than “bltlphHAAAAA.” On the other hand, funny people can make just about anything funny, and we have those people — of course I mean you — standing by.

I noticed that Madden (who died in 2016; here’s my Conversational column in her memory) violated her own standard of requiring at least a syllable when she gave ink to “N’Arc de Triomphe” — yay, I’m not the only person who accidentally breaks her own explicit rules — but I do want this contest to be different from our many “change one letter” neologism contests, and so, yes, not just one letter.

And please, use your own name.