Style Conversational Week 1467: Our annual wretchrospective

The Style Invitational Empress on this week’s do-over contest and winning spoonerisms

December 16, 2021 at 4:37 p.m. EST

Given that the editors said no last week to a cartoon depicting Woodrow Wilson fishing a crouton from a woman's decolletage, it seemed sensible to ask Bob Staake to give this poor office worker a longer, unbothered shirttail in the final version of this week's Style Invitational cartoon. But this very sketch (or a host of others) could be yours: Bob has special prices for his Invite art at bobstaake.com/SI.

This email was forwarded to me a few days ago: “For several years I have followed and appreciated the list of Neologisms published each year by The Washington Post — but would like to know the procedure for submitting one for consideration.”

I’m not sure what the person has “followed” for “several years”; I’m guessing that she’s perhaps read more than once the corrupted lists — from 1998 — of new meanings for existing words (Style Invitational Week 266), and words changed by one letter (Week 278), that continue to pop up with amazing energy. I didn’t ask, “You have, huh?” but I did, as always, clarify that The Style Invitational is a weekly contest offering a wide variety of humor challenges, including several neologism contests a year, and I invited her to sign up for the weekly notification newsletter.