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Looking for a Style Invitational contest to run this week — the search never ends; send me ideas! — I was delighted to discover in the Losers’ <a href="http://www.nrars.org/0%20The%20Book%20of%20Weeks/mastercontestlist0all.html" >Master Contest List </a>that it had been more than a year since we’d last ran one of my favorite contests, Mess With Our Heads. (Since then, we had a spinoff contest in which you insert a “typo” in the the headline, but the last pure Mess was in March 2018.)

So let’s welcome <a href="http://wapo.st/invite1327" >Week 1327</a>.

Over the years since I first ran this contest in 2004, the rules and parameters have evolved as the Invite moved more and more to the Internet, The Post instituted its paywall to nonsubscribers, and headlines themselves began to change in format and nature.  And lots of questions arose over the years, too many to fit in the body of the Invite itself.   Luckily,  for the past nine years I’ve had this column to give me space to drone on even further with more guidance.

Some of which I am copying directly from the <a href="http://wapo.st/conv1269" >Week 1269 Style Conversational </a>in March 2018, since I’m not changing the rules this year. (See Wheel, Reinventing the.) That column, in turn, links to an earlier one, zubzubzub. Below is a summary FAQ that I included last year. And below, I’ll give links to some earlier results, both on The Post’s page and, in a cruder format, a version that’s not affected by the paywall.

What counts as a headline? In a nutshell, it’s anything above the text of an article or ad, as well as a one-line link to another article, as on the paper’s home page. [You may also use a bank head itself as your headline.]

Do I have to use every word in the headline? No, but the part of the hed (journalists use stupid jargo-spellings for everything) you do use can’t mean something hugely different on its own, and you can’t string together unconnected parts of the headline.

Can I change the capitalization or punctuation in the headline?

For capitalization, yes in this particular case: If the headline, like The Post’s current heds, is “downstyle” (capitalized like a sentence rather than a title) and there’s a proper name in the hed that you’d like to reinterpret as a plain ol’ common noun (say “Accord” as an agreement rather than a Honda), then you can write the whole hed as upstyle, as in a book title. If the hed is upstyle to begin with — as the in the illustration above, which uses The Post’s old format — then just leave it that way.

Can I use headings on other online stuff besides newspapers? You can if it has a date on it and it falls within the required window [April 11-22]. Very helpful to me: Copy the URL (website address) and put it underneath your entry. DO NOT EMBED IT into the headline itself; I’ll see a bunch of garble.

One more thing: Sometimes online headlines are ephemeral, especially on a publication’s home page; if it no longer exists, I’ll rely on your honor. But don’t rewrite headlines to make them work for your joke; remember: honor. I can’t check every last headline.

Here are links to some earlier results;  scroll or jump down past that week’s new contest if necessary.  They’re all hilarious reads.

Results of Week 1269, 2018: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/style-invitational-week-1273-come-to-our-aide--restocking-the-cabinet/2018/03/29/d9127156-316d-11e8-8abc-22a366b72f2d_story.html?utm_term=.62dfbbe089e4#report" >Post page</a>; <a href="http://www.nrars.org/0%20The%20Book%20of%20Weeks/archive/new/07%20E-version%20PDFs/1273.pdf" >PDF of Web page</a>.

Results of Week 1191, 2016: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/style-invitational-dont-change-a-letter-but-still-alter-a-movie-title/2016/09/29/5fa0fc74-846d-11e6-a3ef-f35afb41797f_story.html?utm_term=.4c287ae451d2#report" > Post page; </a> <a href="http://www.nrars.org/0%20The%20Book%20of%20Weeks/archive/new/07%20E-version%20PDFs/1195.pdf" >PDF of Web page</a>

Results of Week 987, 2012: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/style-invitational-week-991-tour-de-fours-ix-v-o-t-e-now-and-those-messed-with-heads/2012/10/04/3635ebe0-0b65-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_story.html?utm_term=.eee09b2325c5" >Post page;</a> <a href="http://www.nrars.org/0%20The%20Book%20of%20Weeks/archive/new/03%20html%20from%20docs/0991.htm" >plain-text version </a>

Yet one more tip: Though there have been numerous exceptions in our Messed-With Heads annals, it’s funnier when you use a headline whose real meaning is immediately clear to the reader; that way the reader understands how you’re playing on it. Witness today’s first example, “0% Interest for 5 Years”; obviously “interest” refers to buying something or credit. If the head is perplexing to begin with, then a twist on it isn’t likely to be very funny. Sports headlines, weather headlines, and ads have been especially fruitful in this contest.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, FRACTION*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1323
 
*Too-long non-inking headline by Jesse Frankovich

The huge quantity of entries — my rough estimate is 2,800 from more than 300 entrants — for <a href="http://wapo.st/invite1323" >Week 1323</a>, our contest to chop one or more letters off the beginning and/or the end of a movie title, was a good prep event for me as I gear up for what’s traditionally the year’s most popular contest, “foal” names (deadline for <a href="http://wapo.st/invite1326" >Week 1326 </a>is April 15; entries are already pouring in).

Though I admit to resorting to various caffeinated concoctions over the past week,  judging this contest was fun because there was so much funny stuff:   I inititally checked off  about 10 percent of the entries — close to 300 —  as inkworthy.  If you didn’t get ink this week,  you very well may have made my short­list several times over.

Most everyone followed the instructions and didn’t cut letters from the middle of the titles.  Most.

There’s just no way to know which of your  brilliant ideas are going to be everyone else’s brilliant idea.   This week,  many, many titles were truncated the same way.  Sometimes the entries canceled one another out, like   [S]PEED and  NO COUNTRY FOR OLD ME[N];  often I chose the one whose wording I liked best.  Occasionally I ran two different angles on the same title.

Looking at the entries now, I see that a large majority of this week’s inking entries were not unique titles; in fact, among the top four winners, only Craig Dykstra’s “DUDE, WHERE’S MY CA” was. The only other uniques (I’m pretty sure) out of the 40 that get ink this week: “A Boy and His D” (Seth Tucker); Jeff Contompasis’s “Atman”; Brendan Beary’s “Fried Green Tom”; Sam Mertens’s “Angled”; Lawrence McGuire’s “Thief of Bag”; Edward Gordon’s “Tom Menace”; Mike Gips’s “Sic World”; Will Stutzman’s “Sleepless in Seat”; Bill Spencer’s “Ton Place”; David Peckarsky’s “NGO Unchained”; and Jon Ketzner’s “Ink Pant.” (If you also used one of these titles, my apologies, but I didn’t like yours as much.)

Speaking of Mr. Peckarsky, it was a boffo day at the box office:  He not only won his first Lose Cannon, but he also scored three honorable mentions,  considerably boosting his previous 23-ink all-time total.  Similarly, second-place finisher Jerome Uher jumps from eight to 10.  Neal Starkman scores his 11th ink “above the fold,” for a total that’s still shy of 100 all time.  Only Craig, with his 328th blot,  is among the obsessive types who so often occupy the Losers’ Circle, and even he hasn’t been around much lately.   It’s fun to see the new names.  We also have a healthy four First Offenders, as well as at least a couple of people who get bumped up from the One-Hit Wonders list this week.

What Doug Dug: “Lotsa good ones,” Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood told me correctly. Doug’s favorites came from the HMs: [A]MADEUS, in which Tyler Perry plays twins (Greg Dobbins) [B]LACK PANTHER, starring N’oah (Frank Osen); [O]LIVER!: “Please, sir, I want less” (Jesse Aronson, Michelle Gluck, who both happen to get their second blots of ink); and Jerome’s [C]LICK: An Adam Sandler movie that doesn’t quite suck — but comes awfully close.

(A couple of unprintables are at the bottom of this column.)

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT? HOW TO KNOW

Among the many gems at NRARS, the Losers’ website maintained by Elden Carnahan, is an indispensable new document: It combines virtually every word ever printed in The Style Invitational into one easily searchable text file. Did we do that headline already? Search and see. The file loads surprisingly fast on a computer, too. <a href="http://www.nrars.org/0%20The%20Book%20of%20Weeks/word%20index/alltextout.txt" >See it here. </a> (By the way: Elden is on a short leave from the Loser Stats and so they’ll be a few weeks behind for just a little while longer.)

At the brewpub Denizens in Silver Spring. I hear that Loser Susan Thompson is visiting from North Carolina and plans to attend. I can’t make it that day (Sunday at noon) but I hope you can join her and the others. <a href="http://www.nrars.org/brunchdataout.html" >(RSVP here.) </a>

There were surprisingly few really unprintable entries among the ones that made me laugh; “The Wizard of O” had at least a dozen descriptions but it was only John Hutchins’s that was too graphic: “This time it’s Dorothy, not the Wicked Witch, who gets wet at the end of the movie.”

Jon Ketzner returns to his usual mentions in this section with “King of Come[dy]: Ron Jeremy biopic.”

Our most famously unprintable Loser, Tom Witte, was uncharacteristically tame this week.  But he did get a tribute from Jesse Frankovich, using the same title that Jeff Contompasis suggested for this section’s heading:   Dirty Har[ry]: Style Invitational lewd dude Tom Witte asks himself one question: “Do I feel lucky?”

University of Maryland at College Park, BA in economics, 1980

Pat Myers is the "Empress" of The Style Invitational, The Washington Post's famed contest for clever, edgy, wacky humor and wordplay. In the role since 2003 -- 900-plus contests ago -- she writes the column and is its only judge. She also writes the weekly Style Conversational column and runs the Style Invitational Devotees page on Facebook.

Pat Myers

The Washington Post

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