Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Words Are In Style (and a contest?)

If you like words, your friends have undoubtedly received a certain email from several friends repeatedly over the years. It starts out with "Each year the Washington Post asks its readers to take a word from the English language and by adding, removing or changing only one letter create a new word..". Oddly enough, the same words win every year. (click here for the longest list I found.) The Washington Post does indeed have writing contests and undoubtedly had this one at some point, but they don't do it every year. People are better at creating emails and urban myths than at creating new words. The Post still has writing contests in their weekly "Style Invitational". The current contest asks you to "Translate a sentence or two of literature or other good writing so that "Los Angeles residents under 40" can appreciate it." You have to read the contest to see why they ask that. (You have to register to read the Wash. Post online, but it's free and easy).
I know the Bills (Brohaugh and my dad) and Susan (word whores all) will be right on this.
My first entry is already in, so I can reveal a bit of it here. I took "A Tale of Two Cities": It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair . . ." becomes "Times were good, the LA Times sucked....we thought the Dodgers could win, we knew they'd be out of the playoffs".
When you are done entering that contest I have one for you here. I invite all 5 of my readers to take a word from the English language and by adding, removing or changing only one letter create a new word and define it. I would add a space to "contest" to make it "con test", an email or a blogger contest that you can't decide whether is real or fake. The winner of my contest gets a copy of Everything You Know About English Is Wrong.

Humor-Blogs.com are winners.

4 comments:

Susan said...

Hey! Someone stole my comment! If you see it lying around you can throw it away.

In it I pointed out the coincidence (is it really?) that I planned on writing about words today but just haven't gotten around to it yet.

And I'm telling Mom you called me a whore.

JohnnyB said...

"noincidence": when you think you did something like post a comment but the incident never actually occured.

Susan said...

Entry #1:
oenpologist: An expert in the study of wine - the day after intense studying.

Susan said...

I was going to enter liberati but it seems someone already beat me to it