Style Conversational Week 1475: The Empress on The Style Invitational’s contest for a Washington Commanders song
8 min readSo you’d think that the team’s rebranding would, first thing, purge itself of one of its most embarrassing trademarks: the fight song “Hail to the Redskins.” But according to a recent ESPN story, the team’s president, Jason Wright, “said Commanders will be folded into the old fight song, though with updated lyrics after fan input.” REEEEALLLLY?
Well, we’ll happily offer up Mark Raffman’s example at the top of this week’s Style Invitational, Week 1475. We’re sure the team will especially appreciate its allusions to the current woes (ah, schadenfreude!) of longtime Horrible Team Owner Snyder. And we invite your own effort as well — either a song (to any tune) or a cheer for the team, either of them entirely satiric. And for those of you who aren’t inspired by football, there’s a huge out: You can write something about any other Washington institution — and there are a lot of Washington institutions. I will absolutely run my favorite Commanders songs and cheers, but there will be lots of room for the alternatives.
I’m even giving you the extra week that I do for most song contests, especially for people who might record a video. Deadline is Monday, Feb. 28.
Scholars of The Style Invitational may be arching their eyebrows (or furrowing them, in the Southern Hemisphere) over my decision to do this contest, given that back in Week 862, in 2010, the results were so lame that I withheld most of the top prizes (“Sometimes it’s not enough to be the best. You have to be good, too”). That contest was for a song or cheer for any city’s team. Here are the entries I ran that week.
For any team in Florida: Gooooo . . . say, honey, what’s the name of the team we like? (George Smith, Frederick)
Redskins, Redskins, they’re our guys!/ If they can’t do it . . . no surprise. (Craig Dykstra, Centreville) [a longtime season ticket holder]
Team Canada: Please forgive us if we beat you. (Christopher Lamora, Arlington)
Baltimore Orioles: Pray for rain! (Mel Loftus, Holmen, Wis.)
Team Saudi Arabia: We will, we will stone you! (Peter Metrinko, Gainesville)
Montreal Alouettes: Gimme an Eh! (Josh Borken, Minneapolis)
Gimme an L! Gimme another L! [edited for space] Gimme an H! What’s that spell? Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch! (Russell Beland, Fairfax)
Team Mexico baseball: Give us the runs! (Kevin Dopart)
Team North Korea: 2,4,6,8, let us brutally destroy our enemies and bask in the admiration and glory of our Dear Leader, who is great! (Mike Gips, Bethesda)
Let’s go, Redskins, give a cheer! We just love Coach [add name here]. (Craig Dykstra)
Detroit Red Wings: Watch our team control the puck — the only thing here that doesn’t suck. (Judy Blanchard, Novi, Mich.)
Ain’t no payroll high enough, ain’t no scandal low enough, ain’t no ego wide enough to keep me from cheerin’ for you! Go Yankees! (Jeff Brechlin, Eagan, Minn.)
Hockey’s San Jose Sharks: The Sharks will get you, there’s no doubt; / We’ll chew you up and spit you out! / (This plan is maybe not so hot: / Our teeth are missing — we forgot.) (Beverley Sharp, Washington)
The Boston Red Sox, best with glove/ Along with wicked ball and bat/ To this great team, I give my love / Straight from the bottom of my heart. * It does too rhyme. (Jeff Contompasis, Ashburn [but a Massachusetts native])
And here, courtesy of Wikipedia, are the original lyrics, sung every time the team scored a touchdown beginning in 1938 all the way to 1972. They were written by Corinne Griffith, wife of the team owner. (Hear it sung here.)
Hail to the Redskins! Hail Victory!
Braves on the Warpath! Fight for old D.C.!
Scalp ‘em, swamp ’um — We will take ‘um big score
Read ‘um, weep ‘um, touchdown! — we want heap more
Fight on, fight on till you have won
Sons of Wash-ing-ton. Rah! Rah! Rah! …
In 1972, team president Edward Bennett Williams agreed to change the middle lines to these:
Run or pass and score — we want a lot more!
Beat ’em, swamp ’em, touchdown! — let the points soar!
(Just right there is good evidence why sometimes it’s better to just throw out the rotten mess than to try to patch it up.)
Given the ups and mostly downs of the past two years, I’d fallen out of the habit of checking the “Our Social Engorgements” calendar of Loser brunches and other gatherings at the Losers’ website, NRARS.org. But I looked just in time to see that we’ll be brunching at noon on Sunday, Feb. 20, at the Spanish Diner in downtown Bethesda, Md. It’s a fairly new restaurant from the famed chef, restaurateur and Admirable Person José Andrés, who wanted to bring the down-home cooking of his native land to an informal setting in the D.C. area. The menu looks interesting, and includes breakfast all day of a traditional egg-and-potato dish. Not shockingly expensive, especially since parking in downtown Bethesda garages is free on Sunday. Expect to show proof of vaccination.
I’m always eager to meet new Losers (or just fans of the Invitational) and reconnect with the veterans. If you’re going, RSVP to elden (dot) carnahan (at) gmail.com so we can make the reservation correctly.
The inkrEDIBles*: The results of Week 1471
*Non-inking headline by Chris Doyle
Our annual Tour de Fours neologism contest — this year for words and phrases featuring the consecutive letters B-I-D-E in any order — drew a healthy (well, depends on your definition of health) 1,400 entries, resulting in my I’m-so-generous 49 inking entries, almost all of which made the print Invite as well as the online one (anyway, it’s probably for the best that readers sipping their morning coffee over Arts & Style section not cast their eyes on Fried Biopsies — especially since Kevin Dopart also refers to a human-placenta cookbook — or Jesse Frankovich’s Hemorrhoid Belt, “an unpleasant region of space near Uranus.”
While some purists (I hear you, Tom Witte) believe that spreading the letter block across two words defeats the spirit of the contest, I especially like that option, since it allows for virtually any of the 24 permutations of the four letters, and a lot more variety than if we’d used only single words. (Also, I can tell you that a lot of those single-word neologisms aren’t easy to read — which isn’t a good way to get a joke across.)
While I made no effort to include as many different blocks as possible, by my count today’s ink encompasses 16 of the 24, and almost every other permutation was used as well. (I didn’t see any for IEBD.) Not surprisingly, the most frequent one was BIDE, with lots of Biden references, plus bidets, abides, bid, etc. BEDI also got lots.
Also not surprisingly, there were many cases of Loserly Minds Thinking Alike. Twelve people submitted DEBITANTE; the ink went to Leif Picoult because he also tossed in the new card-owner’s eventual DEBITANTE BAWL after spending too much. I was surprised to see that two people had submitted RABBI ED — both with a synagogue named “B’neigh”-something. (“B’nai” means “House of” in Hebrew, as in a congregation named B’nai Shalom.) Bob Kruger got the
ink by adding that the rebooted sitcom also starred Mare Winningham (I guess Whinnyham would have been just toooo much) as — I hope people get this — the canter.
Wow, what a week for Invite Hall of Famer Beverley Sharp! With STUPID BELT! — one that went and made itself smaller over the past year — Beverley wins her third Clowning Achievement trophy, but her 16th win all-time; I’m sure she has some of all our previous trophies as well, since she’s been Inviting since Week 604, back in the Inker days. And she has four blots of ink in all this week, to bring her up to 815 all-time.
Meanwhile, we have a new name in this week’s Losers’ Circle: It’s the first ink “above the fold,” and a total of nine, for David Stonner, who offered IMBEDIMENT, “the thing that makes you roll over and go back to sleep,” along with how to use it convincingly: “Sorry I was late to work, but I encountered a major imbediment this morning.” David gets his choice of the “For Best Results, Pour Into Top End” Loser Mug or our “Whole Fools” Grossery Bag; let me know, David. Want to pick it up at the Loser Brunch?
Filling out the Losers Circle are Jesse Frankovich, who now has 130 blots of ink in the past year alone; and Still A Rookie Leif Picoult, who has an impressive four inks above the fold out of just 26 in all. Jesse offered the pickup-line field of APPLIED BIOLOGY (i.e., sex), while Leif (rhymes with “waif”) came up with BIDEN-GO-SEEK to describe the seemingly impossible task of getting any congressional cooperation.
What Doug Dug: The faves this week of Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood: Once again, Doug agreed with me about the winners (we’ve been on the same humor wavelength for decades) and also singled out these from the honorable mentions: Rookie sensation Pam Shermeyer’s INSTABIDET (“Oh, the many uses of the humble garden hose!”); Also a Rookie Lori Lipman Brown’s PLAN B DIET (“When Plan A, the chocolate diet, doesn’t work”); Craig Dykstra’s AMBIDEN (“This new drug helps one sleep through an unpopular presidency. “Snore more years!”); Coleman Glenn’s CANDIED BROCCOLI, well-intentioned sugarcoating that backfires: Duncan Stevens’s DIE BARD, complete with a line from the movie script: “Huzzah! Yippee! My joy I cannot smother./ I speak to thee, thou &*@#er of a mother”; and Jesse Frankovich’s THE INCREDIBLE SULK (“Bruce Banner: The Teenage Years”).
We couldn’t aBIDE these: Some unprintables:
BEDICK: Finish up gender reassignment. (Milo Sauer)
CADDIE B: She knows a thing or two about clubs, shafts and balls. (Jesse Frankovich)
Libideau: French for “I’m always wet.” (Jeff Shirley)
Just too gross, I felt: IEDBowels: explosive diarrhea. (Stephen Dudzik)
And in a mix of inside baseball (Invite founder Gene Weingarten’s tweets disparaging Indian cuisine) and a tasteless reference (the horrifying Bhopal disaster that blinded hundreds of people): Union Czarbide: Company that spread noxious opinions all over India. (Duncan Stevens, who specifically asked that this appear only in the Conversational)
Thanks to all of you who helpfully pointed out that headline for last weekend’s print Invite said “Week 1744” instead of the correct “Week 1474.” We will be issuing little strips of newsprint for you to glue to your copies.
