It’s the Style, NOT Mensa Invitational
Dear Joyce:
Thanks for taking the time to check out the provenance of the “Mensa Invitational” list you then posted on your blog.
You’re so close, though.
The “blog post” (see below) you referred to was actually the introduction to one of the weekly contests of The Style Invitational, which I run. And two Style Invitational contests from 1998 are the sources of many — but not all — of the neologisms in the lists above. (For example, “decafalon” isn’t a one-letter change from “decathlon,” is it? Or “caterpallor”?) Much better to see the real thing — every week at washingtonpost.com/styleinvitational.
The Style Invitational is a weekly humor/wordplay contest with unbelievably clever humor contributed by thousands of readers. It’s published every Saturday in The Post’s Style (features) section, and every Friday afternoon at about 3:30 Eastern. There are neologism contests regularly, but also lots of other sources of humor as well.
The results to be posted on Friday, Feb. 12, are for funny “rhopalic” sentences in which the successive word has to be one letter shorter than the last one. (Click on Week 856 to see the results.)
And last week’s results (Feb. 6, 2010) were for “shrunken” movie and book titles. The top winners: The Fifth Sense: “I smell dead people.” (Adam and Russell Beland, Fairfax) The Mediocre Gatsby: The biography of Tareq Salahi. (Ira Allen, Bethesda) Slaughterhouse $4.99: A family gets to choose among beef, chicken and pork with all the trimmings — only at Denny’s! (Greg Arnold, Herndon) Three Days of the Condom: Love on a shoestring. (Edmund Conti, Raleigh) See the rest of the winners at washingtonpost.com/styleinvitational. Or you can become a fan of “Washington Post Style” on Facebook and you’ll get a link to the Invitational when it’s posted. I hope you pass this information on to your readers, and that you and they become regular readers and maybe even regular entrants.
Best, The Empress of The Style Invitational
