The 2019 Lyttle Lytton Contest #

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The 2019 Winners

“Are you okay?” asks my sister Tlaloc. “You’re as green as the parrots that inhabit this part of the continent.”

Sally was fully prepared to slide down the water slide to impress Frank akin to how her eggs slid from her ovaries down her pubescent Fallopian tubes.

Ryan Tang

Some might argue that this is strikingly similar to the Lyttle Lytton sample sentence that has been kicking around the Internet since 2001, but this entry provides a bit more context. And while it may seem to be a random and cringeworthy simile, it’s easy to imagine an author who’s very impressed with himself for making the link between young Sally’s ovulation and her attempt to attract a mate. It’s also easy to imagine that author running for Senate in Alabama.

As the fireman entered the burning building, he felt a warm rush blow over him—like when you open the oven door and get that jet of warm air.

Ben Mackenzie

Braeden was more handsome than Philip the Handsome, the first Habsburg king of Castile, who ruled for two months before dying of typhoid fever.

Brandon Summers

If you ever look at a portrait of Philip the Handsome, you may wonder what on earth the people who hand out epithets are thinking, but then you look at the other Habsburgs and you realize what kind of curve he’s being graded on.

Humph eyed the corpse, its face split in two in much the same way as the Brexit referendum had divided her native country in 2016.

Christopher Hoult

Still better-looking than Philip the Handsome’s descendant Charles II. (In the family tree of Charles II, Philip appears no fewer than fourteen times: twice as his 3×great‑grandfather, six times as his 4×great‑grandfather, and six more times as his 5×great‑grandfather. The Habsburg family tree looks like a loaf of fougasse bread.)

“To be or not to be” is not the question when one is born onto the lowest rungs of society; one simply has the choice “not to be” thrust upon them like a dirty blanket.

Sarah Stanton

Light flowed like butter into the morning windowpane.

anonymous

I woke, my nipples saluting the sultry 7 a.m. sunlight slinking through the blinds to splash across my pert breasts.

Adam Osborn

Her perfectly formed breasts swayed soothingly as I (also a woman, this isn’t a “male gaze” thing) fell in love with them.

Greg Filpus

Tiffany had always dreamed of attending the Gathering, but even as Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J stomped triumphantly onstage, she couldn’t take her eyes off Brian.

David Otto

This entry succeeds in being hilariously bad because of its phrasing and structure, but above all, because there are men in their late forties who actually do go by these names.

Truant children mocked Jack Tranton as he walked. He could have easily dispatched them with his military training. But he ignored them.

Max Peake

It was recently pointed out to me that, irrespective of what I might say about my comedic preferences, I am more likely to laugh at a reference than at an original joke. Maybe so, though I don’t think that laughter is the measure of all things comedic: I might burst out laughing at something mildly funny, while something deeply funny might just make me think, “Wow, that is deeply funny.” This entry is funny in and of itself, partly in the incongruity of the stimulus and the considered response, partly in the stiff diction (“truant”, “mocked”, “dispatched”), and partly in the way the sentence seems to find the protagonist’s decision not to murder the jeering children a model of heroic restraint. But I think I liked it just as much for its referential humor, in that it is a standard trope in action stories (particularly comics) for a character’s invincibility in combat to be explained with a handwavey reference to military training (or, even more often, martial arts training). Throw in the fact that it does sound like the beginning of a novel that some publisher out there might have gone for, and you have this year’s runner‑up.

The canvasser at my doorstep was attractive, but not my type. I knew as soon as I saw her that she was the kind of leftist who felt her feelings were more important than any facts on the ground.

Will McGill

The POTUS (President of the United States), who was Bernie Sanders instead of Donald Trump, started his job for the day.

Jake Scott

I guess this is where we’d be if The West Wing had lasted a few years longer.

My hand swam into her cinereous hair, sexily greeting the greyish strands with innumerable fingers.

Taylor Eruysal

Natalie, an atypical girl, sat reading “Beowulf” as her uneducated girl peers sniggered around her.

anonymous

It seems like every year’s list features a couple of entries about a youthful outcast and her superiority to the in‑crowd, and here’s yet another one. Why include it, then? Mainly the phrase “uneducated girl peers”, which has just the right amount of awkwardness. Here are some others that made the list due to different types of awkwardness, ranging from that arising from the inherent difficulty of communicating spatial relations in text…

The shadowy figure stood alone in the rain on the street corner under the dim yellow streetlight, casting a long thin shadow down the alley perpendicular to him.

Sam

…to the use of an article in place of a possessive pronoun (in a participial phrase that is questionable anyway)…

The dame’s hat lifted off by the wind and settled on the ground, revealing the head.

Logan LeMont

…to a sentence whose use of implied objects stretches the bounds of plausibility, but which I couldn’t resist including anyway:

With my palm perfectly flat, her horse bit me anyway—any trust for the equine bolted in that moment as surely as it did with the carrot I’d hoped to win its own with.

Seumas Campbell

We have three more in the division for original entries. This one succeeds for its earnestness in a context that makes that earnestness amusing:

If I’d have known then that it would be my own brother under the clown mask, under the phantom pirate mask, I never would’ve agreed to split up and check it out, not for a million Scooby Snacks.

Gabriel Stevenson

Every year there’s one entry that stands out for making the reader blink and say, “Wait, what?” What’s especially great about these is that what prompts that response is always new and different, or else it couldn’t really prompt that response. Here’s this year’s edition:

Manfred, Freya the Viking goddess’s last raid’s 9-months-later surprise, cried for nursing. Meanwhile Blutdurst, the passionate and devoted battle-axe, urged for sharpening.

Dominikus Plaschg

This is the heart-warming story of Ella and how she accepts the tElla of God’s love, gets rMegannge on her school bullies and achiMegans success in life!

Samantha Pine

This brings us to the division for found entries, and let’s start with the winner:

It was a soft gray night with a half-moon forming a perfect D in the sky. D for what, Alex wondered. Danger? Discovery? Or Disaster? Only time would tell.

Alex Rider: Stormbreaker
quoted by Ben Roberts

Back in my MSTing days I would have called this D for Deep Hurting. Why so painful? First, there’s the equation of a half‑lit spheroid and the letter D—it’s not a perfect match, and never could be, because the resemblance is only approximate even if you’re really into sans‑serif fonts. Then there’s the fact that language is essentially arbitrary and whether a word starts with D or not is just a matter of historical accident, not cosmic correspondence. So the notion that the moon could somehow be sending one of these messages to Alex could not possibly be more inane. Why not guess that it’s trying to call out his name using the Cherokee syllabary?

Papua New Guinea is so violent that more than 820 languages are spoken there.

“Ask E. Jean: My Husband Is Sleeping with My Mother”
quoted by Katherine Morayati

So I guess that when the MPAA says “rated R for violence and language” it’s just being redundant.

The humble mouse has become an extension of our arms as we click fervently from one email to the next.

“13 Techie Baby Names That Are Actually Super Cute”
quoted anonymously

“Clicking fervently from one email to the next” sounds like how a TV news reporter in 1991 would describe what all those people with “modems” were doing on the “Internet”. (Also, while the author suggests that the “humble mouse” may soon be on its way out, isn’t that predicting the past more than predicting the future, even for an article first published in 2016? I can’t remember the last time I saw someone using a mouse: the laptop people use their touchpads and the phone people just poke at their screens. I’m enough of a luddite that I still use a tower desktop, but even I haven’t used a mouse in over twenty-five years—I’m a trackball guy.)

With her “yes”, Mary became the most influential woman in history. Without social networks, she became the first “influencer”: the “influencer” of God.

@Pontifex tweet
quoted by Aidan Lockett

I am Barrister. Barr Johnson Mark a lawyer in Cotonou Benin Republic. Mr.Jorge., a gold merchant, who was my client died as a result of lung cancer. Now I want to present you as the next of kin.

The 2019 Lyttle Lytton Contest#

The 2019 Lyttle Lytton Contest #