Style Invitational Week 1482: The Tile Invitational IX
Make new words from ScrabbleGrams letter sets. Plus poems using only words from Randall Munroe's 'Simple Writer' -- and he explains how 'youngling' got in there
ABGLNOO > LOANBOG: The 793-page real estate contract you have to initial on every page in three places. (By Bob Staake for The Post)
—If you’re not yet getting this newsletter by email (or if you got dropped because you didn’t expressly opt in since we moved over to Substack): By all means …
As she does each year, the Empress of The Style Invitational gives you several dozen seven-letter sets from the ScrabbleGrams word game, then asks you to make your own terms out of them. You can use all seven letters, or six or five. Deadline for Week 1482: Monday night, April 11.
And we have the results of a contest in which we asked our Loserbards to write poems using only the 1,000 — make that “ten hundred” — words deemed most common by “Thing Explainer” author and xkcd.com creator Randall Munroe. The winning (and Losing) entries manage to touch on everything from the Jan. 6 riots to the war in Ukraine (including “Put-in”) to daylight-saving time to Tom Brady.
The Losers discovered some puzzling omissions from the ten hundred, such as “nine,” as well as the downright weird inclusion of “youngling.” I asked Randall Munroe to tell us how that happened, and I share his response in my supplementary column, The Style Conversational. And if you’re thinking of playing with your Scrabble tiles, see my rules of thumb for writing neologisms.
Plus: How to make your seder truly Loserly with the best parodies.
LINKS TO …
This week's Invitational column, Week 1482, and results of Week 1478
The same column for non-subscribers (but do sign up — there are always great promotions going on!)
No-paywall entry form for Week 1482
This week’s Style Conversational column
Still running -- deadline Monday night, April 4: It’s our perennial Mess With Our Heads contest, in which you reinterpret (or misinterpret) a headline from any paper or website this week by writing a bank head, or subtitle. See Week 1481 here; see the no-paywall entry form here.
More ways to enjoy The Style Invitational and be part of the Loser Community:
Join the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook and the Devs will anagram your name every which way.
Also on Facebook, the Style Invitational Ink of the Day page presents one classic entry as a colorful graphic that's easy to share. "Like" the page to get it regularly on your news feed, or to scroll through the archives. bit.ly/inkofday.
And we're now on Season 2 of the You're Invited podcast, half-hour episodes with host Mike Gips and various Invite luminaries. Catch all 18 episodes at bit.ly/invite-podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
— Pat Myers, Empress of The Style Invitational, pat.myers@washpost.com (or just reply to this email)
*That's Loser with a capital L; named for the runner-up prizes emblazoned "LOSER," the community of regular Style Invitational entrants now proudly calls itself the Losers. If you enter the Invite, you're a Genuine Loser. But not (necessarily) a loser.