Style Conversational Week 1220: Can hairsplitting be sidesplitting? Try.



    The Style Invitational Empress ruminates all over this week’s
    contest and results


This is the sky that the passengers of the Titanic would have seen,
noted Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who noticed immediately that the night sky in
the movie was not just the wrong part of the sky, but also the same
section doubled. (© Neil deGrasse Tyson/Hayden Planetarium)
By Pat Myers <https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/pat-myers/>
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/pat-myers/>
Pat Myers

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/pat-myers/>
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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March 23, 2017

“Great catch!” Instead of eye-rolling, the Empress usually cheers when
someone notes an inaccuracy that everyone else missed — as when Neil
DeGrasse Tyson watched poor Rose drift in the sea in “Titanic” and,
instead of getting all goopy, focused on something else: “There she is
looking up,” as he noted in a2009 panel discussion
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B6jSfRuptY>. “There is only one sky
she should have been looking at . . . and it was the wrong sky! Worse
than that, it was not only the wrong sky; the left-half of the sky was a
mirror reflection of the right-half of the sky! It was not only wrong,
it was lazy!”

Ultimately, in response to Tyson’s beef, director James Cameron fixed
the sky for the 10th-anniversary rerelease. Score one for the acunerd —
the term that Loser Jeff Contompasis coined to get ink this week in the
results of Week 1216, using this very example.

The Loser Community is surely well salted with acunerds, and so I’m
expecting to learn some fascinating clarifications in Week 1220
<http://bit.ly/invite1220>of The Style Invitational, which asks for
humorous quibbles. What’s the difference between a standard quibble and
a humorous quibble? It’s possible that just the coolness of the
observation might get it some ink. But more likely the humor will lie in
the way it’s presented: Two paragraphs listing inaccuracies: not
humorous. A man lamenting that his anatomical lectures in response to
sweet-nothings have hurt his dating life: humorous.

In fact, it was that second-place entry about the heart, from Week 330
in 1999 (results here
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/invitational/invit990801.htm>;
scroll past that week’s new contest), by Major Loser Joseph Romm
(nowslightly better known
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Romm>as a climate change
activist) that prompted the Empress to rerun the “nerdspeak” contest, as
the Czar called it: She saw Joe’s “autonomic blood pump” entry reprinted
on Twitter by Loser Mark Eckenwiler, just after she’d seen the “acunerd”
entry for Week 1216.

What this contest /isn’t: / Rants based on a misunderstanding of an
expression, à la Miss Emily Litella’s “What’s all this I hear about our
natural racehorses
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qatwRUt2RoA#t=0m25s>”? The quibbling
should be at least literally accurate.

We’ve had other contests that invited pedantry, though they focused more
on idiocy than acunerdity. In Week 297, in 1998, the Czar offered a
contest for misguided letters to the editor, “Free for Oil” (?), that
described itself “a cross between Emily Litella and the Post’s Free for
All [quibbly] letters page on any given Saturday.” The winner that week,
by David Genser, isn’t pertinent to this week’s contest but is classic: “

HAND-DELIVERED. URGENT! To the editor: Do not let them bury those people
whose pictures you showed in Sunday’s obituaries! Most of them look like
they are still alive!

But this one by John Kammer from that week could fit the bill: It quotes
the headline “Momentum Is Building in Downtown Revival.” “I continue to
be appalled by your poor understanding and incorrect usage of even the
simplest physics terms. Momentum is the property of mass multiplied by
velocity. As buildings remain at rest, they have no momentum. The term
you are looking for is ‘inertia.’ ” (Full results of Week 297 here
<http://www.nrars.org/0%20The%20Book%20of%20Weeks/archive/new/04%20html%20scrape%20or%20search/0300.htm>.)


And in Week 779 (2008), there were these in a contest for stupid rants
(full results here
<http://www.nrars.org/0%20The%20Book%20of%20Weeks/archive/new/01%20text/0783.txt>):


“No matter how many times I tell my local grocers that a tomato is a
fruit, not a vegetable, they keep putting them between the potatoes and
the onions. What’s next, putting the asparagus beside the blueberries?”
(Marjorie Streeter, Reston)

“ ‘Objects in Mirror ...’-- How can an object be in a mirror? Is it
inside the plastic housing that sticks out of the car door? Why is our
government mandating this absurd perversion of our language? (Russ
Taylor, Vienna, Va.)

I’m likely missing some more examples from the Invite’s previous 1,219
contests. Feel free to waste untold hours perusing Loser Elden
Carnahan’s Master Contest List
<http://www.nrars.org/0%20The%20Book%20of%20Weeks/mastercontestlist0all.html>at
NRARS.org to find a couple more.

*DESPERATELY SEEKIN LOSIN’*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1216*

/Excellent but too-long-for-print headline by Tom Witte /

The word search grid I created in Week 1216 <http://bit.ly/invite1216>,
once again using a bunch ofrandomly generated words,
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/conversations/style-conversational-week-1216-griddy-language/2017/02/23/972403ba-f7fb-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html?utm_term=.3558e5b7573b>
proved a fruitful field for many made-up ones as well, as were our two
previous contests like this. Judging from the entries I checked (just
the inkworthy ones), almost everyone followed the rules to string the
word together using adjacent letters (once each). However, one person
gets ink today out of the goodness of the Imperial Heart, having
neglected to include the coordinates of the word’s first letter even
thoughI’d demanded this
<http://s1237.photobucket.com/user/Pat_Myers/media/Style%20Invitational%20pictures/week%201216%20warning_zpsbadgbvxm.jpg.html?sort=3&o=0>
in boldface, italics, capitals, quotated, you name it. (I think it’s
that I’m so naturally mean that I keep trying to hide it by doing the
occasional nice thing.)

While this week’s winner is, once again, a gem of zingy political humor,
we’re finally starting to diversify the jokes again after weeks and
weeks of almost Nothing But Him; this week’s other “above the fold”
entries are merely about embarrassing cluelessness (fourth place) and
insensitive, uncaring caddishness (third and second) by no one in
particular, rather than ahem.

It’s the second win in a month, and the fourth in all, for Jesse
Frankovich, but those stats don’t reflect the crazy success Jesse’s had
since he started Inviting in earnest after a brief dip into Loserdom
many years ago: In the past year or so, he’s accumulated close to 140
blots of ink — usually more than one a week — and finding himself in the
Losers’ circle repeatedly, in whatever kind of contest I throw out
there. (Remember that I judge the entries without knowing who wrote
them; for Week 1216, in fact, I sorted the entire pool of the entries by
coordinates — better to choose the best of several definitions for
LIAGRA, for example — so Jesse’s 25 individual entries were spread out
all over the master list. I had no idea whose entries were whose until I
looked up the winners a couple of days ago.)

Frank Osen had a similar dazzling streak a few years back; it’s subsided
a bit but he’s certainly still blotting up gobs of ink. I hope he enjoys
his Toilet Tunes electronic musical mat, and would love to hear a
recording of his performance on it (sans background noise) but would
decline a video. Todd DeLap has his choice of either the brand-new “You
Gotta Play to Lose” <http://bit.ly/invite1219> Loser mug, which might
arrive this week, or the last of the “This Is Your Brain on Mugs” (I
discovered four more specimens). Todd got to see in advance last night
which word of his I was considering for ink, when I sent my short­list
(no names attached) to him so he could run it through the nifty
validator he’d devised for his own entries and offered to use on them
all. He didn’t know it was going to be a runner-up, though, his 80th
blot of ink.

And it’s just Ink No. 6 for Bruce Johnson, but his second trip to the
Losers’ Circle; Bruce once shared first-runner-up honors — in Week 152,
1996, for a contest to write lurid headlines for a non-lurid story:
“Baboon-Man Escapes”: The story reported that the recipient of an ape’s
immune cells was feeling so good he had resumed an active lifestyle,
even going boating.

One clever entry, by Ray Gallucci, deliberately broke the rules, tracing
the letters back on themselves: HARASSSARAH, a true Palin-drome.

*What Doug Dug: * Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood deemed this week an
especially strong one. His favorites were all honorable mentions: Frank
Osen’s ARFTIME (midpoint of the Puppy Bowl), Jeff Contompasis’s
aforementioned ACUNERD and also DORKKNOT (a man-bun); William Kennard’s
exclusive school, SNOTHURST; and Mark Raffman’s WETI, the Abominable
Rain Man.

*Too griddy for the Invite: The unprintables *

They include:
FAPTAIN: The master of his domain (Chris Doyle)
CARPE A MUFF: Seize ’em by the pussy (Jeff Shirley)
And . . . FKS U AGAIN PLNTY: 2020 Trump/Bannon campaign hat slogan
(Kevin Mettinger)