Style Invitational Week 1483: Pun for the Roses -- our famous foal-name wordplay contest
The Invite's most popular game, with 100 great names. Plus winning Wordle-grid phrases.
“A brief Tinder love story: Swipe right, spend the night, take flight.” It’s Hildy Zampella’s winning entry in our Wordle-phrase contest. See the rest in this week’s Style Invitational.
—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 …
“Breed” Happy Jack with Make It Big and name the foal Ecstatic Jack
Iron Works x Enough Already = Iron“StopsWorking”
Clapton x Apprehend = Clapton Irons
It’s our biggest contest of the year — the Empress often gets 4,000 entries — and one of the most fun. In this week’s Style invitational, Week 1483, is a list of 100 of the 300-some horses nominated for the 2022 Triple Crown races. “Breed” any two names and name the “foal” to play off both parents’ names, as in the examples above. (Yes, we know they’re almost all male. We do not care.) You can send in as many as 25 foals — and I bet you can come up with a bunch of them. Deadline for Week 1483: Monday night, April 18.
And we have the results of a contest in which we asked for phrases consisting of up to six five-letter words, as in a Wordle grid. The Losers managed to write pithily and, uh, quintily about everything from “Don’t Say Gay” to the world’s least desired musical ensemble, not to mention a few digs at our still flaring Worldle obsession.
If you’re new to the foal contest, be sure to see my tips and touts in my supplementary column, The Style Conversational. And just in: the announcement of Loserfest ’22 — a five-day trip to Niagara Falls, Canadian side. (The Royal Consort and I, who haven’t had a vacation since 2019, are signing up. Join us!)
LINKS TO …
This week's Invitational column, Week 1483, and results of Week 1479
The same column for non-subscribers (but do sign up — there are always great promotions going on!)
No-paywall entry form for Week 1483
This week’s Style Conversational column
Still running -- deadline Monday night, April 11: It’s our annual “Tile Invitational” to create new words out of any of 36 seven-letter “racks” from the ScrabbleGrams word game. See Week 1482 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.