Style Conversational Week 1474: Send in the Clowner — stat! The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s Hyphen the Terrible contest plus the results of another neologistic challenge The Empress may have to bend the rules on her 100 Clowners for 100 Losers policy and give Sarah Walsh a second one for her Week 1474 win, after the attention given to this one by Sarah's youthful Labrador. (Sarah Walsh) By Pat Myers February 3, 2022 at 5:22 p.m. EST Everyone’s a critic, I guess. Thanks a lot, Maisy. Maisy is Sarah Walsh’s year-old Labrador retriever (or “Lab assistant,” since she’s kind of small). And Maisy seems to have taken issue with Sarah’s Clowning Achievement trophy for her win in Style Invitational Week 1419, the “joint legislation” contest: The Bordeaux-Gimenez-Torres Resolution [bored o’him and his stories], limiting long-winded uncles at Thanksgiving to 20 minutes tops. “The first thing I discovered was the little ruffle — I was like, ‘ohhhhh [something associated with dog walking].’ ” And so the Empress is going to make an exception to her 100 Clowners for 100 Losers policy — there were only 100 Disembodied Clown Heads to be found, in some craft store’s clearance sale — and send Sarah a second trophy for her win today in Week 1470, rather than the customary “II” flag to attach to the base. Because a flag towering over an assortment of smithereens would be too sorry a sight even for us. ADVERTISING Sarah’s winning prefix to attach to a name, phrase or title? UnZIP-A-DEE-DOO-DAH: Step 1 in boys’ toilet training. With today’s win plus two honorable mentions — InterMISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (another toilet joke) and DeJOY TO THE WORLD (about presents arriving late in the mail), Sarah’s accumulated 69 blots of ink, including six runners-up in addition to her two wins, since she got her Fir Stink in 2019 with a description of the creation of Eve, as penned by Jane Austen. Sarah is a serious Austen Devotee, attending those conventions in period costumes that she makes herself. (Not to mention her one-woman show as Abigail Adams.) And she’s been a contestant on both “Jeopardy!” and “The Chase.” But those pursuits yield ZERO clown heads on sticks. Maisy would get nothing! The rest of this week’s Losers’ Circle also consists of Invite addicts: Frank Mann wins a plush toy vial of vaccine — Frank, if you have a dog, consider yourself warned — for NiTWITTER, a good name for the Deplatformed One’s planned social media network. And Hall of Famers Beverley Sharp and Duncan Stevens — Beverley for ForGETTING TO KNOW YOU (“At the senior center, you get to meet new people every day”) and the Duncster for PassWORDLE (you have to remember your login info in six tries) — are by now overmugged and overbagged and get emails instead of swag; it’s the 59th runner-up win for Beverley, the 50th for Duncan. But ink also went out to Losers we hadn’t heard from in a while: Elliott Schiff (AntiGONE IN 60 SECONDS) last got ink in Week 1217, four years ago (but his first in Week 402, 21 years ago); it’s also been a couple of years for Gordon Cobb, from Atlanta, and Mike Ostapiej, from South Carolina. And we have a First Offender this week — on his first try, too: Mike Swift of Florida (StereoTYPEWRITER). When I posted the Invite to the Style Invitational Devotees group this morning, Mike commented: “It was four years ago today (exactly!) that I joined the group and finally got up the nerve to enter. Woot! It was fun, and my car is in desperate need of a new air freshener.” Now the trick is for Mike to find it fun when he enters and doesn’t get ink. Happens to the best of 'em! Because the Week 1470 entries were one-liners (as they also are for this week’s contest) it was easy for me to shuffle all the entries into one anonymous alphabetical list. But I couldn’t be shocked to find out that Chris Doyle, the Invite’s highest-scoring Loser, made my final list five times over: THE DumBEST IS YET TO COME (Louie Gohmert weighs a presidential run); CriMEA CULPA (what Putin’s not about to do); TiktOK BOOMER (“what your kids say when you ask, ‘What the heck are you watching?’ ”); sneaking a parody (of what else) into DisroBE OUR GUEST; and finally, having Donald Trump enter this contest to say I ALONE CAN preFIX IT. Oh, yeah, Chris also suggested this contest four weeks ago. Pretty nice week, Chris. That seems to leave you with 2,399 blots of ink. (Second place: Tom Witte, with 1,682.) Some very good entries didn’t follow the rules. Some people put the “prefix” at the end of a word, as in BATMANna, unexpected help from a superhero (Leif Picoult). More subtly, the explicit direction that the prefix had to be at least one syllable ruled out Bill Dorner’s otherwise excellent SAVING PRIVATE aRYAN (Richard Spencer’s hope in court); here the A isn’t pronounced in itself (pretty much the definition of a syllable) but has to blend in with the R following it. What Doug Dug: The faves this week of Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood included all four top winners along with Elliott Schiff’s AntiGONE IN 60 SECONDS, Greg Dobbins’s DaDA VINCI, Chris Doyle’s CriMEA CULPA, Jesse Rifkin’s DateLABRADOR (“Update: No further sniffing”), Mark Raffman’s ForGETTYSBURG, and Chris’s I ALONE CAN preFIX IT. (Some unprintables from Week 1470 appear at the very bottom of this page. Don’t look at them if you don’t like off-color jokes.) A note about last week’s contest (still running!) Our Week 1473 contest — deadline Monday night, Feb. 7 — asks you to write a funny message for either a highway sign or a the marquee for a barbecue joint. I linked to the sign generators at atom.smasher.org, saying that the entry fields on those pages wouldn’t let you type longer than our stated limit of 19 characters a line. It turns out that that’s true for the barbecue marquee but not the highway sign; the latter now lets you type 24 characters. Still, though, for our purposes, please stick to 19 characters. I’ve added wording to that effect in both the contest itself and in the Week 1473 entry form. Wit to be tied*: Our Hyphen the Terrible contest, Week 1474 *Headline by Chris Doyle from a 2012 Hyphen the Terrible contest; it was also used by Danielle Nowlin for a name-chain contest This week’s Hyphen the Terrible contest is the latest in a line dating back to Week 156 in 1996 — it was suggested then by none other than Fred Dawson, creator of the famed painting that I highlighted in last week’s Style Conversational — but we hadn’t done an H the T in five years. So noted Chris Doyle to me, though I don’t expect him to complain that I didn’t credit his suggestion and so he’ll miss out on an “idea” point in the Loser Stats. I was going to make this an only-the-Post contest but link to a special subscription promotion, but Management had some concerns about that. So once again, you’re free to use any publication, as long as the two halves of any given neologism come from the same day of the same publication. (To be honest, this is just an arbitrary way to set some parameters on the contest, so you don’t have to choose among All the Syllables in the World.) In the contest directions, I tell readers to look either here or on this week’s entry form for more details on how to enter. Here’s the whole deal: The main direction: Combine one side of a hyphenated word or phrase with one side of another such term — either side can be the end or the beginning — to create a new term, then describe the result. As in “Di-rector + doz-ens: Rector-doz: A sermon so boring that even the pastor falls asleep” (Beverley Sharp) and the other examples given at the top of the contest. The second requirement: Both halves of the term must come from the same issue of a newspaper (The Post or another one) or published the same day on its website, from Feb. 3 through Feb. 14. It can be in an article, headline, ad, whatever, as long as both parts come from hyphenates. Include the hyphenates you’re using, as above. Anything with a hyphen is fair game: It can be a hyphen that breaks a word at the end of a line so that the type lines up, or justifies, on the right side of the column. Or it can be a hyphen that’s used to join a prefix to a word, or two words together, in the text itself. Or it could be a hyphen that’s part of someone’s name. Anything! Just tell me what you’re using. You can search on hyphens right down a Web page! A dash is not a hyphen. A hyphen is a little thing, the key next to the zero on a standard keyboard. A dash (a.k.a. em-dash) is a longer horizontal line that is used in various ways to break up a sentence. This all-too-contrived sentence contains two hyphens — and it also has a dash. Got it? We want hyphens. (Some persnickety books also use an en-dash, which is between those two in length; it’s the space of a lowercase n, while a regular em-dash is the … well, obvo. But regular journalism usually sticks to hyphens and em-dashes.) For each entry, please tell me which newspaper you’re using (specify print or online) and which date. You don’t have to spell out which articles, ads, etc., or give me a link, but you do need to give me the hyphenated terms for both sides of your word so that I can show the reader where the syllables come from, if they seem to add to the humor. Really, to be honest here, I’m not going to research the provenance of every entry’s two syllables; it’s really a matter of honor, a way to let everyone participate but give you some way to limit yourself. Your new term doesn’t necessarily have to have a hyphen itself. Usually the joke works better that way, but other times a hyphen will interfere with the pronunciation, and so the word will work better without the hyphen. Putting a hyphen elsewhere in the word will probably be too confusing and would kill the joke. A note on the formatting: As I’ve been asking you to do most weeks, please write each entry as one continuous line; i.e., DON’T press Enter in the middle of the entry. This will make sure it doesn’t fall apart when the Empress sorts and shuffles all the entries to ensure blind judging. This is why I need you to say “Washington Post” or whatever for each entry, rather than “All 25 entries come from today’s Post.” Entry deadline is one minute before midnight on Monday, Feb. 14, wherever you are. (However, if some terrible thing happens — say, it’s Valentine’s Day night and you get a little bit wrapped up in something — and you have to be a little late, go ahead; you won’t be locked out. But don’t make it a habit.) Finally, a few random Hyphen the Terrible winners and runners-up from earlier years. Note that sometimes we didn’t hyphenate the winners. Mer-derloin, n. Chipped beef on toast. (Joseph Romm, Week 156, 1996) Narcot-rifice, n. Any body cavity used to smuggle drugs. (Russell Beland, Week 206, 1997) Sex-nipulativeness, n., the ability of women to control men simply by not wearing bras. (Robin D. Grove, Week 244, 1997) [Robin is a man. As was the judge of the contest.] Uni-moron, n. Instead of bombs, this terrorist mails flaming bags of poo. (Chuck Smith, Week 318, 1999) Neigh-der: A dark-horse presidential candidate. (Chris Doyle, Week 368, 2000) Mo-ronto: 1. The Lone Ranger’s mentally challenged companion; 2. Home of Prime Minister Jean Crétin. (Chris Doyle, Week 425, 2001) Testimo-stitute: An expert witness who will say anything if the fee is high enough. (James Pierce, Week 465, 2002) Begin-ity: The other end of infinity. (Michelle Stupak, Week 589, 2005) Suck-istan: Transylvania. (Tom Witte, Week 671, 2006) Mon-ovation: The sound of one hand clapping especially enthusiastically. (Dennis Lindsay, Week 711, 2007) Queuing x reality = Queu-ty: The blonde who’s always allowed to cut into a line. (Phyllis Reinhard, Week 630, 2005) [The judge of this contest was a woman.' Enthusala: A 90-year-old man on Viagra. (Christopher Lamora, Week 976, 2011) BEAUtiful + POLitics: Beau-pol: A charming, intelligent and thoughtful politician who, after leaks of toxic material about his life, turns out to be a disaster. (Mike Gips, Week 1078, 2014) And the last H the T contest: miscon-duct + con-tinued: Miscontinued: Dug a hole and kept digging. “Despite warnings from aides, the nominee miscontinued his sexist remarks.” (Duncan Stevens, Week 1196, 2016) ------------- Pre-nopes: Unprintables from Week 1470: ALL THE PRESIDENT’S seMEN: The most widely read section of the Starr Report. (Chris Doyle) castraTED CRUZ: “Thank you for the insults, Don and Tucker!” (Ryan Martinez) moHelen Keller: One-star Yelp review after a bris gone wrong. (Mark Raffman)