Style Conversational Week 1478: Speak-songs with words everyone knows
The Style Invitational Empress on this week’s contest for poems using the 1,000 most common words (not ‘poem’)
By Pat Myers
Yesterday at 5:18 p.m. EST

Though they were all issued before Obsessive Loser Duncan Stevens started entering The Style Invitational, Duncan managed to accumulate enough vintage Loser T-shirts (mostly as substitutes for other prizes) to make this enormous, totally Loserly quilt. (Courtesy of Duncan Stevens)



I love how Randall Munroe explains how he compiled his list of the 1,000 most common words in English: “The set of ten hundred words in Thing Explainer comes from putting together many ways of counting how much people use a word to come up with a single set of ten hundred words that should sound familiar and simple to lots of people.”

To write that in his blog, Munroe surely used his own Thing Explainer Word Checker, which immediately flags which words aren’t on the list. It’s a bit coy in that he doesn’t say what those “many ways of counting are” — not to mention he doesn’t even show us the list — but this checker works like a charm, and it’s why we’re going to use it for Style Invitational Week 1478, our contest for poems made from any of these 1,000 words.


This nifty checker will make it more fun to write poems for this week's Style Invitational than it was for a similar contest in 2014.
Randall Munroe — creator of the sciency webcomic xkcd.com and the marvelous US Space Team’s Up Goer Five — was also my inspiration the first time I ran this contest (Week 1069 in July 2014), at the suggestion of Loser Ben Aronin.

ADVERTISING


But that time, the 1,000-word list I used turned out to be a little questionable — for one thing, it was drawn from a database of TV and movie scripts, which meant that it included words like “murder” and “Antonio.” And I ran an online validator that time as well, done by a fan of xkcd, but it seems to have been based on a different list from the one I sent contestants to; this list was also a little odd (“smirk,” “focus” and “glare” but not “cow” or “pig” or “tired,” from a random check). The fan did supply a word list, but when I tried to share it this morning with the Style Invitational Devotees on Facebook, FB refused to show it because it deemed it spam.

Anyway, this time we’ll all be using the elegant Simple Writer — and because you have to use the tool to write your entry, I don’t have to worry that you accidentally used an invalid word. And because its range remains to be discovered, I’ll be curious to find out what does and doesn’t come through this time.

Last-minute update! Since I posted the Invite online this morning, Loser Kevin Dopart turned up this Giant Mess of Words that might be The List. Feel free to use it, but make sure you still run your entry through Simple Writer.


Some notes:

You may add a title — and it doesn’t have to qualify as simple.

You may use two or more short words to substitute for a non-simple word, but only because it’s funny and creative to do so. You would have to run them as separate words or hyphenated, or else your word will be flagged as not simple. So if you used “so-up” for “soup,” it would have to be clear to the reader what the heck you meant. Take it from me (and from haters of our Joint Legislation contests): Long strings of these syllables that you have to puzzle out can become wearisome and a dubious stretch.

As always, rhyming poems have to have “perfect rhyme.” Art poetry and Invite poetry can overlap, but when your main goal is funny/clever/zingy rather than lyrical/poignant, true rhymes and clear, consistent meter tends to get you there better. I won’t run worm/swarm, yellow/fellows, etc., and frown on identities — when the last accented syllables of two lines are the same rather than rhyming (leave/believe). Limericks have to be in limerick form, not kind-of limerick form.


Don’t worry about formatting each poem into one line. While I usually ask you not to enter any line breaks within a single Invite entry so that I can shuffle up everyone’s entry alphabetically and super-anonymously, that’s just not workable with poems unless they’re all haiku or some other li’l thing. So I’ll see each entrant’s submission as a whole; i.e., if you send seven poems on one entry form, I’ll see them all together. But still, I won’t see your name — so really, not a big deal. (To be totally honest: If you send, say, 15 poems and I love 12 of them, I’m not going to pick all 12 from who I know is the same person. Conversely, if you send 25 poems and 24 of them are pieces of doo-doo, I will do my best to notice that very good 25th one, the 17th one in the list, but it does run some risk of not being properly appreciated.)

I am 100 percent certain that I will have tons of fabulous material to choose from. Here’s some of what I chose for Week 1069 (full results here; scroll down past that week’s new contest to see the poems); because we used a different validator, the poems probably won’t work totally with Simple Writer.

The winner of the Inkin' Memorial
Same sex marriage? Why the fight?
It’s good for both the left and right.
The left: “This cause the law protects.”
The right: “More weddings mean less sex.” (Mark Raffman; "protects" wouldn't work this time)

I think that I shall never see
A word picture as good-looking as a very big stick that is alive would be. (Gary Crockett, a runner-up)

Just Saying . . .
Your daughter’s going on a date
You tell her not to come home late,
To watch her step and never drink —
(That stupid stuff won’t let you think!)
And one more thing she better know:
That boys are always hot to go!
Your job is done! (Be glad your kid
Has no idea of what you did . . .) (Beverley Sharp, a runner-up)

“Hamlet” as a limerick:
I’m down now that Father is dead
And his brother takes Mother to bed.
My girl just got mad
When I did in her dad.
No wonder I’m out of my head! (Chris Doyle)

I have a big girlfriend, about six-feet-five,
And so hot that she makes me feel glad I’m alive.
I got up on a box to make love face-to-face –
And that was the night that I first fell from Grace. (Craig Dykstra)

And Really Last: The idea for this week was to write something fun
From a list of a thousand small words, which you’ve done.
Now I’ve read what you sent me and, take it from me,
You’d do well not to give up your day job. – The E. (Chris Doyle)

A match made in hyphen*: The results of Week 1474
*Non-inking (too long) headline by Jesse Frankovich, who inked instead with “Hyphen Help Us”


Get started
Advertisement By LinkedIn
Browse the latest open jobs.
See more
For the umpteenth time, and in the umpteenth-minus-a-few variation, the Week 1474 Hyphen the Terrible contest yielded dozens of zingy neologisms and various political digs from various halves of hyphenated words and phrases found in The Post and other publications. Because such a contest requires some searching through at least a few articles, it’s not surprising that there were fewer entrants than usual (resulting in more multiple ink for a few) and no First Offenders.

While each term was made from syllables on one side or other of a hyphen, I left the hyphens out of some of the neologisms themself they would have detracted from the understanding of the word. For example, Tom Witte’s interrogato — a curious cat — was formed from Interroga-tion + go-to; if I ran it as “interroga-to,” it would have messed up the “gato.” I showed the original syllables for the top four entries, to show the reader how the contest worked, then left out the rest, since they rarely add to the joke itself and become a bit tiresome to read.

Some neologisms depended too much on the original words; for instance, “Disbia” — the state of having no voice — was the joining of Dis-trict and Colum-bia; as in no meaningful representation in Congress. But you can’t recognize that from the outer-syllable “disbia.” (And were I to spell that all that out, it probably would have felt heavy-handed to the reader.) The inking entries, more than 40 of them, work well as either portmanteaux, combining two recognizable words, or roots with prefixes or suffixes — plus one threebie: Kevin Dopart’s rip-up-licans, referring, like this week’s winning entry involving toilets, to the former president’s disposal of records that are required by law to be preserved.


It was a banner week for Loser Steve Smith, who returns after a few months off to claim his third Clowning Achievement trophy — or, more precisely, a little “III” pennant to stick onto his single Clowner (in our 100 Clowners for 100 Losers program). Steve combined the first halves of “paper-work” and “privi-lege” to make paper-privi, “the repository for highly sensitive Trump administration documents.” (The former guy denies having flushed his presidential papers down the White House toilets, though New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman says in her new book that staffers discovered a royal loo clogged with something other than Charmin.) Steve also picked up honorable mentions with St.-Ick, a sketchy Santa, and confectious, what a snotty 4-year-old’s birthday cake can be. The Losers’ Circle was filled out by Hall of Famer Gary Crockett’s non-nouncement, politicians’ stock, highly suspect answer about whether they’ll run for higher office: “I’m 100 percent focused on the job the voters elected me to do”; Ann Martin’s misinforma-ven, “someone who does his own research”; and Leif Picoult’s de-tween, to take the Super Mario sheets off the bed of the ninth-grader.

What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood tells me that he got a laugh (or four) out of all the “above-the-fold” winners, and also singled out from the honorable mentions: Kevin Dopart’s lib-surdity, “any criticism of the dynamic tourism at the Capitol that day,” attributed to the RNC; Jonathan Jensen’s de-publican, who “won’t Manchin any names”; Tom Witte’s interrogato, a curious cat; Jeff Contompasis’s pre-publicans, “advocates of police defunding who have yet to be mugged”; Barbara Turner’s solo-plause, from that one person who doesn’t know when not to clap (it would have been perfect for Sen. Chuck Schumer at the State of the Union this past Tuesday); and especially Jesse Frankovich’s life-free, describing someone who’d spend a ridiculous amount of time looking for hyphenated words.

I had marked a few entries that illustrate what doesn’t work in a neologism contest, but I think I’ll save them for advice the next time I run one, rather than a postmortem.

Next Loser sighting: brunch March 20, Potomac, Md.
(Reprinted from last week) I unfortunately have a conflict that day, but otherwise I’d definitely waddle to and from to the giant old-fashioned breakfast/lunch buffet tables at Normandie Farm in Potomac, Md., first-time site of the next Loser brunch. There’s everything from lox and bagels to a full plate of roast turkey with cranberry sauce. There’s also regular menu service. Mask at the buffet, of course. That’s Sunday, March 20, at noon. See a whole year’s (tentative) brunch and party schedule on the Our Social Engorgements page at the Losers’ own website, NRARS.org. As always, any Losers, Friends/Handlers of Losers, and Just Fans are totally welcome.