Style Conversational Week 1471: Our po’ pourri
The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s retrospective and new Tour de Fours contest

A childhood photo of CC, for Cloned Cat or perhaps CopyCat, the late subject of Beverley Sharp's obit poem featured in this week's Style Invitational (Larry Wadsworth/Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences)
By Pat Myers
January 13, 2022 at 5:03 p.m. EST



I won’t lie: I luvvv contests that come around every year — especially ones that have been as consistently rewarding as our Tour de Fours neologism contest, returning this week in its 18th incarnation, with, of course its 18th different letter set, B-I-D-E. The key is that there are 24 different permutations of the letters, and even ones like DBIE can work because the neologism could be a multi-word phrase as well as a single word, and the block can stretch over a space. I betcha someone out there will try for all 24.

Like last week’s contest (still running!) for “prefixes,” Tour de Fours had its genesis in the old New York Magazine Competition and was suggested by Loser and erstwhile NYM mainstay Chris Doyle.

T d’F doesn’t need a lot of explanation, for once, so I’ll just share a few past inking entries from over the years, including some deep cuts from the honorable mentions.


Last year’s winner, for UNDO: Ickspound: To overshare about your bodily functions. “To start the Zoom meeting, the boss ickspounded on barfing up a whole bag of multicolored Skittles.” (Terri Berg Smith)

Also from 2021: UNDO: Innuendo U.: “Come inside and check out the intimate relationship you’d have with our well-endowed faculty.” (Danielle Nowlin)

From 2020: LIAR (ha-ha, I’m such a card): Nostrail: What inevitably drips down your face when you’ve got the sniffles in February and you’re wearing your big gloves. (Jeff Contompasis, Ashburn, Va.)

Also from 2020: LIAR: Receding airline: The flight you just missed as it disappears into the sky. (Jeff Shirley)

From 2017: SANT: Cantstand: A vigorous exercise of disapproval. “We were watching ‘Sex and the City,’ but Dad started doing cantstands, so now we’re watching the game.” (Frank Osen)


SANT: ATNs (Automated Teller Nymphs): The wee folk who pass $20 bills through the slot when you swipe your card. (Warren Tanabe)

From 2015: DICE: Flied chicken: The day-old special at Earl’s Shack o’ Wings. (Larry Gray)

DICE: Deciderer: What W called his Magic 8 Ball. (Rob Wolf)

From 2013: SANE: Senatorpedo: Cruz missile. “The Tea Party’s vaunted senatorpedo self-destructed shortly after its launch.” (Chris Doyle)

SANE: Esanem: Rapper also known as Slam Shady. (Ellen Raphaeli)

From 2011: NOEL: Groucholenses: How to look at the world through nose-covered glasses. (Eric Fritz)

NOEL: Coloneye: James Bond flick where the villain gets it in the end. (Dion Black)

From 2009: ERTH: Rhettrovirus: Scarlett fever. (Judy Blanchard)

ERTH: Laughterthought: The brilliant Invitational entry you come up with just after the deadline. (Ann Martin)


From 2006: ALEF: Halfaleak-halfaleak: How Tennyson charged johnward in his old age. (Chris Doyle)

ALEF: Eiffelated: Given a warm “bonjour” at La Paris Hilton. (Jay Shuck,

And from Tour de Fours I, 2004, in my first year of Empressing:

Week 571: THES: Transvestheight: The distance between the jockstrap and the bra. (Frank Mullen)

THES: Allrightest: Superlatively whatever. (Brendan Beary)

THES: Smahtest: From the only state that didn’t vote for Nixon in ’72. (Dan Seidman, Watertown, Mass.)

Gag reflux*: The 2021 retrospective, Part 1
*The results headline from 2020, by Kevin Dopart

It’s more fun to judge 25 contests at once than thousands of entries to a single contest — and I’d think you’ll also especially enjoy reading the results of Week 1467, our Kook’s Tour of what turned out to be 17 varied contests from the first half of the past year.


As in most years, almost all the entrants to the retrospective contests were Invite veterans who’d entered the contests last year; when judging, I sometimes remembered the entries from my shortlists the first time around. Sometimes — in long-form contests like song parodies, or in contests with 4,000 entries, like foal names — I can’t come close to running all the week’s inkworthy entries, and so sometimes also-rans finally get their just deserts here. Other times, non-inking entries are reworked and sometimes updated. And still, a sizable percentage of the entries are brand-new.

It’s the second Invite win, but the first Clowning Achievement for Jesse Rifkin, for pairing Othello’s iambic line “I can again thy former light restore” with a modern counterpart from Sen. Ted Cruz, “I’ll deal with Texas’s electrical grid after I get back from Cancún.” It was a year ago when Cruz skipped out on his state’s crippling power failure during an unprecedented freeze, but the brazenness of that act (along with Cruz’s continued presence in the news) merits continued gibes, IM (un) HO.

One of our relatively few Losers under age 30, Jesse has a regular gig performing on weekends in the “dueling pianos” singalongs at the Georgetown Piano Bar. He’ll be dropping by at the Loser party on Jan. 22 (see the invitation at the bottom of this column!) and invites everyone to follow him to the bar afterward. But I’m thinking that it’s more workable if we arrange a separate Loser outing, especially if we wait till Omicron pipes down. This is Jesse’s 64th blot of ink; and during the pandemic he recruited his dad to give the Invite a try as well — Larry Rifkin already has seven blots of his own and has become a regular entrant. Win-win!


And in second place, a rookie who might prove a phenom! Roxi Slemp has been reading The Style Invitational “forever,” but only in the past couple of months thought about entering herself, after writing a song parody for a friend’s granddaughter. A former D.C. area resident who fell in love with Argentina on a visit there and then decided to retire in the ultra-scenic town of Bariloche in Patagonia. (Now there’s a place to stop by!) Roxi started entering the Invite a few weeks ago, and got her first ink in Week 1462, imagining a “job switch” between Mitch McConnell and Pee-wee Herman. (“Today’s secret word is ‘filibuster’! Ha-ha! For the rest of the day, whenever anybody says the secret word, scream real loud!”). And this time, Roxi aces one of the most competitive Invite categories, the song parody, with a subject who’s not revealed till the end of the song.

Keep bringing it, Roxi!

Jonathan Paul has run up more than 400 blots of Invite ink — including an astonishing 25 victories — mostly from the early years of the Invite. Jonathan now mostly specializes in our annual horse name “breeding” contest, and sure enough, “Like the King x Troubadour = Henry VIII Iamb,” which wasn’t one of the 25 names Jonathan submitted in April, wins him a Loser Mug or Grossery Bag. And it was also a new “collaboration” from Jeff Hazle — Elton John and Sen. Joe Manchin to write “Block-It Man,” that fills out this week’s Losers’ Circle. (Actually, Jeff was working with the idea in the first go-round of Week 1422, but Nikolai Tesla for “Shock-It Man” and John Roberts for “Docket Man” were “noinks,” as the Devotees call them.)


The return of parody diva Sophie Crafts to the Invite — with “Santa Baby” turned into “Antibodies,” with the assistance of a cuddly, googly-eyed, dancing covid microbe — is one of the unquestionable highlights of this week’s results. You might remember Sophie’s first Invite video, “Two Darn Shots,” from Week 1440; this one (which brings back Sophie’s “Dr. Fauci” in a cameo) might be even more charming.

Sophie, an educator in the Cambridge, Mass., public schools, told me that her original plan for the antibodies was to use simple finger puppets, but her friend Alex Ezorsky-Lie, who does both puppetry and animation, had another suggestion.

He came up with the Y-shaped, Muppetish purple hand puppet you see explaining antibodies to Santa-hatted, evening-gowned Sophie, and that’s Alex’s arm you see under it. But the real showstopper was his filming that same puppet 10 times over for the “babies sequence,” as Sophie calls it, and editing it so they twirl around like synchronized swimmers — or even a kaleidoscope — through a red fabric “bloodstream.”


There were several other fine parodies — not to mention lots of other inkworthy entries — that I just didn’t have room for this time. As usual after parody contests, I’ll post some over the next few days in the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook; you can search on “#parodies.”


What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood, who read the 25 entries that made the print edition, is back to agreeing with me on the winners (as, of course, he should be). And he also singled out Mark Raffman’s limerick on the new-to-Merriam-Webster “antivax” from Week 1413, Jon Gearhart’s joint legislation of “Torres-Mann-Spartz” mandating button flies instead of zippers in pants; Bob Kruger’s “collaboration” of Hawthorne and Clifford the Big Red Dog to produce “The Scarlet Litter”; and, from Mississippi native and Arkansas resident Drew Bennett, the neologism “Yallzball” — as in what the Alabama referee says when he turns the football over to the other team.

Nope! The unprintables: Because of the varied formats of the Week 1467 entries, I couldn’t shuffle them all out in The Big Sort, so I read each Loser’s set of entries at once (though I didn’t see anyone’s name). And one single person sent all these:

(Grandfoals) IGotRhythmMethod x In Tents = Squirts in Yurts


Lip Loch x Mmph! Talk Later = Lap Lick

(Alternative plots for movie titles): “North by Northwest”: A young man must learn to live with Peyronie’s disease.

I was not shocked to discover that the author was Tom Witte, who somehow has managed to get more than 1,500 printable entries in the paper dating back to Week 7.

Last call for the Loser party, Jan. 22!
Just copying this in from last week’s Convo: Right now, we’re at a super-cozy guest list of 23 people, so there should be a minimum of crowding. Still, that’s plenty for singing and schmoozing, and it’ll be nice to chat with people and not have to rush from guest to guest. Okay, here:

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 [ASAP!!!] 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.