Kansas girl with a dog,
aided by brave companions,
journeyed up to Oz, in time
recalling the exquisite value
of red footwear.
— Scrabblegram by David Cohen (blanks are D and O)
—If you’re not yet getting this free newsletter by email (or if you got dropped because you didn’t expressly opt in since we moved over to Substack): By all means …
This week’s contest — and I know it’s doable: For Week 1504, write a Scrabblegram — an anagram of all 100 tiles in an English-language Scrabble set (your choice for the two blanks). Any punctuation is fine. Your writing can be a funny thought, a poem, a dialogue, what-evah, like the example above by the wizard who posts one of these every day on his Twitter account Scrabblegrams by Dave. Deadline is Monday night, Sept. 12.
There’s a fun way to make sure your anagram uses exactly those 100 letters: Run it through Wordsmith.com’s Anagram Checker — and you can even animate your writing into a GIF that continuously arranges and unarranges all the letters in and out of your gem of writing.
And we’re Scrabble-adjacent in and out this week: This week’s results are the winners of our contest to make up new words whose letters total 15 Scrabble points, and as with all our neologism contests, it’s produced classic additions to the Loser Lexicon, like:
Geeze: To behave like your granddad. “Sheesh, 40 years old and he’s already starting to geeze about the kids’ music.”
Or Subpeony: The official flower of the Justice Department — it’s been in full bloom lately in Florida and Georgia.
For more amazing work from David Cohen — and equally (or more) amazing anagrams from one of our earlier contests — check out my supplementary column, The Style Conversational.
——
LINKS TO …
This week’s Invitational column, Week 1504, with the results of Week 1500
The same column for non-subscribers (but do sign up — there are always great promotions going on!)
This week’s Style Conversational column
The Convo for non-subscribers
Paywall-free entry form for Week 1504
Still running -- deadline also Monday night, Sept. 12: It’s Week 1503, our contest for songs about food — growing it, cooking it, eating it, throwing it, anything — either parodies or originals, videos or just lyrics.
Paywall-free entry form for Week 1503
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 have two seasons’ worth 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.