The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational
This is one of those e-mails that circulates around the Internet every few months, passed on from person to person. The e-mail begins with “The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year’s winners. Read them carefully. Each is an artificial word with only one letter altered to form a real word. Some are terrifically innovative:” or something similar and then proceeds to list a number of the supposedly winning entries. I was annoyed reading it today because several of the supposed entries were blatantly not a part of the original contests, given that they didn’t follow the contest’s rules.
There’s no such thing as “The Washington Post Mensa Invitational”. Nor is there an annual contest. On the other hand, the Washington Post does have a weekly contest called “The Style Invitational”. Each Sunday, the paper posts a new contest, the most recent one being Week 719 We Har the World. Only three of the contests have been change-a-letter type contests — in 1998, 2003, and 2007.
The Washington Post itself alludes to this e-mail in the Week 699 entry* for the Style Invitational:
It still hasn’t stopped: With mystifying regularity, we continue to receive (often passed through several mailboxes at The Post) unsolicited entries to what’s sometimes called the “Mensa Invitational,” and most recently “Change a Letter, Change a Lot”: The results of Week 271 have continued to orbit in cyberspace for almost 10 years, picking up forwarders’ own efforts along the way. We hope these lost souls find us this week. This week’s contest: Take a word, term or name that begins with E, F, G or H; add one letter, subtract one letter, replace one letter or transpose two letters; and define the new word, as in the examples above, which got ink in 1998 and 2003.
(Coincidentally, Week 699 was the first time I’d ever seen the contest before, which is why it sticks in my head.)
They got some of that wrong — week 271 wasn’t the change-a-letter contest, it was a Yogi Bera contest — but you get the point, which is that the e-mail going around is (a) very old and (b) only very slightly traceable back to the original Washington Post contests.
‘Nuff said.
June 28th, 2007 at 21:08
Hah. Thought I’d do a quick search to see what comes up in a search on “Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational” or “Washington Post Mensa Invitational”. I was very pleased to see that I wasn’t alone.
In April 2006, a poster at VegSource.com quoted a kenwheaton.blogspot.com article that no longer exists anywhere (not even the Wayback Machine), from Monday, November 21, 2005, and called “As I Please”:
(The Style Invitational (or rather “The Stool Invitational”) for August 2, 1998, which was Week 281, was called “Calculate the Odds”.)
There was also an interesting post in October 2006 on rosswriting.blogspot.com called ‘”Giving Credit Where It’s Due” Dept.’
And there was a post on Sugar & Spice in May 2007 debunking it as well.
But, unfortunately, most of the results were from people perpetuating the myth by posting it without any research on their blogs. Bit disappointing, that.