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Style Conversational Week 1452: Boggle our minds

The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week’s neologism contest and limerick results

September 2, 2021 at 5:24 p.m. EDT
The 39 words that the Empress fed into the word-find generator in an attempt to get lots of vowels within a 20-by-20 grid. These words all go in straight lines (forward, backward, up, down) but yours can snake around every which way.

For some reason (or, more likely, no reason at all), last year we skipped what’s become an annual contest: “discovering” neologisms or phrases within a word-search grid. Anyway, I’m especially optimistic about As the Word Turns No. 6, Week 1452 (deadline Sept. 13).

I think I’m getting better at gaming the grid: Instead of typing in a couple dozen long words (the puzzle generator then incorporates them into the grid, filling in the rest with extra letters), this time I used 39 mostly short words, almost all of them full of vowels. This ought to provide even more possibilities. I was finding tons of real words as well in addition to the dozens that I’d fed into the construction app; this grid might be more fertile for entries than any of our five previous ones.

FWIW, here are the words I used, referring to a page that listed words that had a lot of vowels; some recent lists from the New York Times Spelling Bee game; and a bit of utter randomness. I didn’t see any settings to specify how many letters across and down I wanted, so I just added and dropped words until it produced the 20-by-20 grid I used this week.

The words: ACACIA, ADAGIO, AERO, AEROBE, AIOLI, ALLOT, ATAXIA, AUDIO, AUREOLA, BEAU, CRAP, EPEE, EVACUEE, FUGU, ILEA, INHALE, INTAGLIO, INVITE, IRIS, LLANO, LOUIE, LULU, MELEE, MINI, ODIOUS, OLEO, PIPIT, QUAI, ROUE, TAPIR, TEXT, TITAN, TITI, TRACK, UTOPIA, UVEA, VIRTUE, ZITI, ZOEA

In past years I traced the winding paths of some sample words through the grid, to show that you didn’t have to use a straight line. But a few people said it made it hard to read or at least concentrate on the ground. So hopefully such phrases as “snake through,” “any direction or several directions” and “as in Boggle” will get the point across without the scribble.

So very wit-he*: The limericks of Week 1448

*Non-inking headline by Duncan Stevens
As we’ve done every August since its infancy in 2004, we’ve given a shot in the arm to OEDILF.com — the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form — by sending out a call for limericks featuring words from an eensy-weensy section of the alphabet, and coming up with dozens of outstandingly clever and well-crafted five-liners. (See farther down on how to submit your limerick there.) This year we took on “he-” words; as usual, the entries ranged from the heavenly to the hellish, but the inking entries from Week 1448 once again demonstrate how it’s done. Among the close to 1,000 limericks I received from 137 entrants, more than 100 made my first cut. (Why, yes, your entry did indeed make that shortlist. Absolutely.)

It’s the second Clowning Achievement — but the 15th win all-time — for Hall of Fame Loser (and frequent Loserbard) Beverley Sharp, with her limerick on “hearsay.” Beverley will get a little golf-hole-type flag with a “II” on it to attach to the base of her Disembodied Clown Head on a Stick, and inks No. 786 and 787. By the way, the name “The Style Conversational” was Beverley’s idea when I debuted the supplementary column in 2009. Runners-up Melissa Balmain and Mark Raffman are frequent squatters in the Losers’ Circle, especially in poetry contests, but it’s the first “above the fold” ink — and just the third and fourth blots in all — for Ward Foeller, who warned of the “bad fit of coffin” for anti-vaxers. I’ve only met Ward through a little correspondence in which he expressed difficulty using the Invitational’s entry form on his 3G phone; I think the phone’s power crank and bellows aren’t compatible with the current platform.

There’s a slight but notable variation from perfect rhyme that got ink this week: In perfect rhyme, the last STRESSED syllables of two or more lines rhyme, and any syllables after that are identical — like WEALTH-y, STEALTH-y, HEALTH-y in Gary Crockett’s limerick about gluten-free ice cream. But I also think it’s okay if, instead of being identical, those following syllables rhyme with one another, especially if they have a secondary emphasis in the words. With that, let’s look at this one by George Thompson, which I thought worked great; I especially liked that those three final rhymes had three different vowels — I, U and A — to spell the unaccented schwa before finishing with the rhyming -con/-pon/-gon.

“Bigger government?” Part of the lexicon.

It’s the altar the taxpayer’s neck’s upon.

Someday soon, we may see

An enhanced DoD

In its new, upsized building: the Hexagon.

George’s rhyming is absolutely nothing like “rhymes” in which the rhyming syllables aren’t both accented, or that the un-accented syllables at the end aren’t identical. Among this week’s rhymecrimes: sword/gore; “a kind of charcuterie”/"Give him the boot, hurry"; laconically/all of me/ hematology; interested/in the head; cold/tenfold; break/headache (unless you say the words “ten-FOLD” and “head-ACHE,” in which case you are deluding yourself because no you don’t either).

Other problematic issues:

Unnatural syntax. It’s hard to make words fit the specs for rhyme and meter but still make the writing sound like actual English — which is why it’s hard to get ink in The Style Invitational; some people accomplish this feat with seeming effortlessness, including, I think, all of this week’s inking entrants. This is one reason I warned off people from trying to fit in as many he- words as they can, losing coherence in the process. Like this one: Hemp hedonist, healings he hewed:/ Heaped hearty, her headaches here (s) hewed./ Heed Hemingway heft,/ Hey — herbal health (t) heft!/ Heigh-ho, heaven’s hearsay (esc) hewed.

My headaches are shewing.

— Some people still had no hickory-dickory-dock meter in lines 1, 2 and 5: “A librarian in Tacoma”; “Doing yoga moves, I stretch with all my might”; “Now Hepatitis A and B / Are bad enough for you and me”; “Pillow man Lindy, champion chump”; “Twas a love sporadic, a fleeting tryst”; “Greg adored his husband, Tommy Scott”; “a simple squamous epithelium” — nope, you can’t pronounce it squa-MUSS,

— And some people, gotta love 'em, didn’t use he- words: One entrant used “hieroglyphics” (spelling it correctly; perhaps the person had first spelled it “heiro-,” then checked the spelling, but forgot the contest?); someone else had a “Simpsons” theme with “Homer-sexual marriage” but no he- word.

What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood is finally back from his unexcused-by-me absence in which he dared to go on vacation. Fortunately, he had the good sense to like all of this week’s limericks. His favorites, though, were in the honorable mentions: Doug singled out George Thompson’s above-mentioned “hexagon,” Craig Dykstra’s Line 5 retort to the “herbivore” girlfriend — Girl, a salad’s what my dinner eats!” --; and First Offender Robin Rowland’s disillusioned dig at former “heartthrob” Andrew Cuomo.

If you got ink this week — or even if you didn’t — feel free to submit your limericks to OEDILF.com, especially if they define the word or focus on its meaning. There, the lims go through a reviewing/workshop process in which an editor works with you to perfect their form and content. A number of our Loserbards are active as OEDILF editors as well as writers, so it’s a good chance to learn from the best. If you send in an inking entry, please indicate that it was an honorable mention (or whatever) in Week 1448 of The Style Invitational. (If you didn’t get ink, you don’t have to credit/blame The Post.)

Yes, even YOU are invited to the Flushies, Sunday afternoon, Sept. 19

Regardless of how much ink you have — or even if you have none at all but are just a fan of the Invitational — if you’ve found this column and have read this far down, you’re a member of the Loser Community in my book. So even if this Evite didn’t reach you by email, you’re hereby invited to the 25th annual Flushies, the Loser Community’s own awards/potluck/songfest/just-yakking; this year, because of You Know Why, we’ll be outside in the backyard of Loser Steve Leifer in Potomac, Md. Right now we’re up to a comfortable 36 yeses, including some new Invite phenoms stars as well as your Loserly legends.

Here’s the link to the Evite and most of the details — click on these words. If you weren’t on my invitation mailing list, you can still RSVP by clicking and saying Yes or Maybe. If your email address doesn’t contain your name, please leave your name in the comments or contact me directly so I’ll know who you are. If we don’t yet know each other, I’ll want to chat with you a bit before I give you the specific address, etc.

Wishing a Happy New Year to those for whom Jan. 1 isn’t enough! My judging schedule will be slightly affected by Rosh Hashanah, but I’ll be here next Thursday to explain why you didn’t get ink in Week 1449. A couple of weeks from now, though, I’ll skip the Conversational on Yom Kippur, Sept. 16. (The Invite, of course, will be there for you. I believe that the last week there was no Style Invitational column was the week of Jan. 23, 2000.)