Chalk it up to racing luck.
But, as always — at least for the 19 years I’ve judged this contest — there were also a couple hundred other entries that were in the same league of wordplay and funniness. My shortlist from which I drew today’s 70 inking entries: 270, not counting the names that too many people sent in, like “G Spot” for Seventh Letter x Epicenter. So 200 eminently inkworthy horses — and yes, of course they included yours — were left at the starting gate.
As I promised in the intro to this week’s results, and as an example of how many funny entries there are to choose from at every turn, here are some of the non-inking plays on Grantham, who shares his name with Lord Grantham, a.k.a. Robert Crawley, the fictional patriarch of the soap-without-the-stigma “Downton Abbey.” Some of them were sent by multiple Losers, sometimes with different pairings.
This one got ink: Grantham x On Thin Ice = Downturn Abbey (Sarah Walsh), perhaps because it stood apart from the others. YMMV, as they say.
Grantham x Cant Be Doin That = Downton Grabby
Grantham x Cyberknife = Downton Stabby
Grantham x Make It Big = Downton Flabby
Verbal x Grantham = Downton Gabby
Grantham x Volcanic = Downton Crabby
Grantham x Apprehend = DowntoNABbey
Grantham x Classic Causeway = Downton Abbey Road
Doppelganger x Grantham = Creepy Crawley
Bletchley Park x Grantham = Crypto Crawley
Flying Drummer x Grantham = Krupa Crawley
Grantham x Bloodline = Tudor Manor Born
Grantham x Bureau = Lord of the Files
Grantham x Beyond Best = Lord of the Manna
Absolute Ruler x Grantham = Lordy, Lordy
Grantham x Hopper = Lord’s a-Leaping
Grantham x Rockefeller = Standard Earl
And for something completely different, although two people had this idea: Congressman x Grantham = Pork Subsidy (grant a ham!)
And there weren’t even all that many Grantham entries — in fact, that name was one of the least used, with a mere 36 entries in all. The most? Absolute Ruler, with 205 pairings, according to Count Jonathan Hardis, the Loser who tabulated the horses’ “fertility” along with sorting and making consistent and fixing the spelling of all the entries from the anonymous list I sent him.
Grantham the horse’s own parentage, by the way? Declaration of War x Darby Blush. Sigh. These horse owners should contact the Loser Community. (I couldn’t find out whom Grantham is actually named for; he’s not running in the Derby, anyway.)
Sometimes I’d get the roughly the same pun in a pairing, but liked one framing of it the most. Pairing Rhetoric with Courvoisier yielded these variations (among others):
Courvoisier x Rhetoric: (1) Cognyak, (2) Cognac-ety Yak, (3) Cognackity-yak
But I thought Drew Bennett’s (4) Con Yak was clearly the best of these -- not only is it elegantly pithy, and instantly readable, but it also plays into the meaning of “rhetoric” as empty or misleading political speech — in other words, a con. (Meanwhile, Courvoisier also got ink paired with Absolute Ruler for Genghis Cognac, one of three inks this week by Coleman Glenn.)
Readability was an important criterion for me throughout; entries that were squeezed into 18 characters by dropped letters, “your” changed to “ur,” etc., had little chance (e.g., Barber Road x Gunfighter = Hair2dayGun2morrow). If we’re going to have readers look at 70 of these things, we don’t want to make them weary just trying to see what they say. I did run several entries with words run together, but I had no trouble reading, say, ShavingPrivateRyan (Mark Raffman; Barber Road x American Icon).
I realized that when it came to choosing among so many funny puns, I had a standard about foal names that were puns on people’s names: I tend to prefer when that person relates to one of the parents’ names. For example, Barber Road x Hopper = Sweeney Toad (Laurie Brink; Rob Wolf) works because Sweeney Todd is a barber. Or Witty x Peaceful Waters = Oscar Milde (Jesse Rifkin); Oscar Wilde is synonymous with witty. Or Presidential x Strobe = Abe Blinkin’ (Dave Zarrow). Contrast those with, say, Tawny Port x Octane = Vin Diesel, or Win the Day x Rattle N Roll = Victor Yugo. Nice puns, but I like to see the connection with the person. There are always exceptions, though: Kevin Dopart got ink with Echo Zulu x Crown Pride = Zulu Zulu Top (though you could argue that Z.Z. Top’s band members are renowned for their hair, it’s really beard and not crown). And most notably, Jon Gearhart got lots of acclaim this morning in the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook group for the super-creative Bloodline x Trademark = Aunt™, even with zero Oz connection.
One standard I didn’t use was to wonder how useful they’d be for this week’s contest, the “grandfoals” of Week 1487. But now, looking at the list that I compiled at the bottom of this week’s online Invite, I’m predicting lots of success, especially considering that a number of them aren’t already full of the puns that make breeding those names an extra challenge. So I’m expecting lots of crosses with such foals as Sure I Can and Says Nobody and Sharp Dresser (that last one was a pun, Cyberknife x Bureau, but the result itself doesn’t show it).
The formatting rules for the grandfoals are just like the ones for the foals. But for newbies, here’s what’s on this week’s entry form:
“HOW TO FORMAT YOUR ENTRIES: This is important because the Empress will sort your entries alphabetically. Type each entry in this format, with each entry on a single line: Horse A x Horse B = Your Foal Name. Make sure you spell the real horses’ names correctly! DON’T number your entries or begin them with bullets or the like; just use the names. Don’t use tabs or make them into a table. Don’t boldface them. Just plain old text. Thank you to almost everyone who entered Week 1483 for following these directions.”
Jonathan tells me that actually his program will just toss out the numbers and bullets and such before the names, but on weeks when I have to sort the entries myself, I have to take them out by hand.
The grandfoals are a bit of a challenge because of the aforementioned pun-on-pun action. The good news is that you don’t have to incorporate every element of the name on every level. For guidance and inspiration, let’s look at some of last year’s inking grandfoals (full results from Week 1434 here):
Fourth place: Dodger x Outamind = Ducker Carlson (Jesse Frankovich) No obvious puns in the parents’ names, so complete! Dodger = ducker. Outamind = Tucker Carlson.
Third place: Widespread Luting x TamingOfTheShroom = PlayThatFungiMusic (J.D. Berry) This time, both parents are puns, but J.D. plays only on the words on the page, Luting and Shroom (rather than “looting” etc.), for his own pun.
Second place: CruMBS x Lip Loch = Ruthless Ness (Mark Raffman) Also bursting with punnage. Here, Mark goes not to “crumbs” but to the source, “MBS,” a.k.a. Mohammed bin Salman, and uses “Loch” but not “lip lock,” or kissing. Still works great, and it’s timely and sharp.
And last year’s winner, HaberDasher x It’s All Over = RIP What You Sew (Jonathan Paul), once again plays on the words on the page; it’s clear from the capitalization that HaberDasher was a pun of some sort (Savile Row x Santa Cruiser, by Fred Shuback), but there’s no spelling or pronunciation change.
Oh, two more: Merch Madness x Capital BLTway = NCAAA (Jonathan Hardis). Both sides back to the source here: Jonathan skips “Merch” and references March Madness, for NCAA, and Capital Beltway, no sandwich, for the AAA part.
And the opposite is true for this one: Merch Madness x Parasite = Buy 1 Get 1 Flea (Eric Nelkin; J.D. Berry). Here, there’s nothing about basketball but only the “merch.” And “Parasite” isn’t a pun in itself, so Eric and J.D. could pun on it in his grandfoal without having to consider a second level.
The good news: Almost always, there are far fewer entries for the grandfoal contest, usually 30 to 50 percent fewer. So you have a way better chance. Give it a shot.
It’s the sixth Invite win — but the first of our newer Clowning Achievements — for Genuine Dubliner John O’Byrne, who’s been a chronic Invite Loser for at least 20 years, and has a longtime passion for American history and politics. And so I wasn’t surprised when his all too timely We the People x Absolute Ruler = I the People turned out to have his name attached. I’m hoping that the Clowner trophy, the Disembodied Clown Head on a Stick, will clear customs and won’t be chewed up by the police dogs at Dublin Airport.
Incorrigible recidivists fill out this week’s Losers’ Circle as well: Craig Dykstra adds to his 300-plus inks with Bloodline x Dean’s List = IV League; Hall of Famer Gary Crockett continues to saunter past 500 with the operative (A x B = A modified by B) Smarten Up x Simplification = Dumben Down, and Fairly Recent but Thoroughly Ubiquitous Jonathan Jensen has a super pun with Volcanic x Cant Be Doin That = Erupt to No Good; I’m a sucker for a word that’s a pun on two or more other words.
Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood dug everything this week: Too many good ones to single out, he told me. But he did get a kick out of “the end of the 28-year drought” for Bill Epstein, whose previous two inks were from Weeks 80 and 77. Bill gets his first magnet (back then they got bumper stickers) for Cant Be Doin That x Congressman = Sure I Can.
No First Offenders, though! This may well be the first time that’s true in a horse name contest.
You can still RSVP for the Flushies! Saturday, May 21
We’re up to about 50 Losers, their handlers, and Just Fans for this year’s Flushies, the Losers’ own annual picnic/awards/songfest. It’s Saturday afternoon, May 21, and outside in a nice open space, Steve and Jackie Leifer’s backyard in Potomac, Md. This Evite is for YOU, even if you didn’t get a personal email. Please see the details in last week’s Style Conversational at wapo.st/conv1486. I’d love to meet you and chat, as long as you don’t harangue me about your perfect horse name that didn’t get ink.
I don’t know about y’all, but I’m going to take a long nap this evening. If you got ink this week and you’re sufficiently magnetized with this year’s Loser magnets and are good with getting your “prize” letter as an email attachment (and haven’t already signed up for No More Tchotchkes), let me know.
And on Saturday at 6:57 Eastern time, root for any of the 16 horses in the Derby field that got ink today — everyone but Zandon, Pioneer of Medina, Taiba and Mo Donegal. I’m going with Epicenter. Go, Loser Ponies!
