Welcome to the 2024 edition of the Lyttle Lytton Contest.  This is the first year that entries generated by programs such as ChatGPT have been separated out into their own division; I was surprised to find that the increase in such entries from previous years, when computer-generated entries were included with the found entries, was negligible.  We’ll get to those spinoff divisions in a bit, but let’s start with the main event.  The winner of the 2024 Lyttle Lytton Contest is:

As I explain almost every year, this is not just a “write a funny sentence” contest: one of my criteria in deciding which entries will make it onto this page is my sense that some author out there could plausibly have tried start­ing a novel this way, and not as a joke.  I’m not quite as concerned about that for the honorable mentions, but for the winner, it’s very important.  And this year’s winner… I have to admit that when I was sixteen, I could have written this, and I would have thought that it was great.  That was the year I wrote a story in which a character’s voice “sparkled with strawberry overtones”, after all.  So here we go: what’s sharp?  A lemon!  A lemon tastes sharp!  So the sound of the door is like a lemon!  But it will be confusing to the reader if I don’t specify that it’s the sound that I’m comparing to a lemon!  So it’s an acoustic lemon!  And… I mean, the phrase “acoustic lemon” is completely ridi­culous, but I can absolutely see how an aspiring writer could get there.  So there was no agonizing over choosing a winner this year: this entry arrived quite early in the 2024 submission window, I flagged it as the current leader, and even the best entries to arrive over the course of the next eleven months never challenged it.

So, no other finalists this year, no second place… let’s get straight to the honorable mentions!

This sentence plays with time in a puzzling way.  The word “first” prompts readers to expect that this is historical background.  But then, with “he knew”, we’re in the thick of the novel’s action!  So was our protagonist on hand when mummification was initially developed, as if that were a singular event, and immediately decide it was for him?  If so, why does the sentence refer to “the Egyptians” as though they were an outside group?

The subtle wrongess of the language of the sentence above is the sort of thing this contest has showcased over the years.  The contest rules advise that “sig­nificant butchering of the language (as opposed to subtle butchering)” rarely places an entry among the winners.  But there are always exceptions.  This is about as far as you can go in that direction and still wind up on this page:

This is a run-on sentence with multiple subject-verb agreement errors, but I couldn’t resist “twins with blue eyes each”, much as everyone in the story couldn’t resist those brown locks.  Here’s another one that piles up errors of punctuation, capitalization, and idiom but still managed to make the cut:

I guess most people would say that the orthographical problems pale in com­parison to the talking newborn.  But sadly, sometimes if you want to have a conversation like the one above, you can’t afford to wait:

See, that’s the more subtle butchery I was talking about, with its awkwardly passive construction.  But “subtle” is probably not the word that many would use to describe this one:

That might seem like the end of this ill-fated mother’s story⁠—but maybe not!

I’ve tried to remain optimistic after thirty years of teaching grammar for a living, but if even God Almighty can’t get pronoun case right, maybe it’s time to give up.

Many editions of this contest have featured sizeable crime/mystery sections, but this year saw the number of such entries rise a bit above the norm.  Jessica was far from the only one busy investigating a case of foul play:

There’s a lot going on in that one.  The main joke is that drowning implies death, so the sting at the end is redundant, but consider:

• “P. I. Mento” is a silly pun
  
• He’s gazing out at a tub
  
• The tub is large enough to be “strewn” with corpses, like a battlefield
  
• The corpses are atop the tub
  
• The people drowned themselves deliberately, yet were still able to float to the surface, which sounds difficult

Normally I advise entrants not to mix and match different sources of humor, but as we can see, sometimes it works!

That Detective Scott, he’s a one-man surf and turf platter, I tell ya what.

This genre was also popular among the computer-generated entries:

And this, apparently, was actually published:

For the love of God, Patterson.

Of course, these days enthusiasts of crime and mystery tend not to restrict themselves to reading stories:

And, as we’ve seen, this year crime was everywhere (crime, crime!), whether it be assault:

Or gun violence:

And if that’s how much damage a single firearm inflicts, imagine what happens when war breaks out:

But dropping a bomb is not just a matter of a flash and a bang⁠—each one has a dreadful cost:

Well, surely that’s the biggest boom we’re likely to encounter among this year’s entries, right?

What I like about this one is that at first the error seems to be scientific⁠—“You can’t hear a supernova! Even if you could, you’d be dead from the neutrino pulse before the blast hit!”⁠—but then, wait, there’s a more basic error than any of that: the sentence seems to indicate that the sun is also screaming.

Though crime and mystery entries were up a bit this year, sentences about sex and romance were noticeably down even from a normal year, let alone from their peak in 2020.  I suppose that’s not too surprising in a year when our cast of imaginary authors couldn’t make a love interest sound any more appealing than this:

In their quest to get a romance off the ground, some imaginary authors turned to pharmaceutical enhancement:

And we all know where this sort of thing tends to lead:

Speaking of school uniforms, let’s turn to the classroom for our next honorable mention:

The entry above reminded me of the ninth episode of the Cloak & Dagger TV series, in which a teacher lays out the formula of “the hero’s journey” à la Joseph Campbell in tandem with the title characters undertaking it.  Excru­ciating.

And now that I’ve brought up superheroics:

For the record, it appears that a cheetah’s top speed is almost exactly Mach 0.1.

Some characters have more resilience than the guy whose dreams Billy just shattered:

Here’s a character with some physiological resilience:

Comparisons such as this one are very popular among Lyttle Lytton entrants; in recent years I have tended to group together submissions that revolve around metaphors, similes, and the like, and those sections have been size­able.  Many of the entries above, including this year’s winner, would be candi­dates to be included in such a group.  Here’s a sentence that seems to want to constitute a group of comparisons all by itself:

And different entrants deploy comparisons to achieve amusing badness in different ways.  The winner works because there’s no such thing as an “acoustic lemon”; the sentence featuring Party Pete works because it raises the question of what it even means: what is his liver doing?  (And also because the phrase “normal grain” is funny.)  The ocean sentence works because of its overkill.  But, on rare occasions, the comparisons work just because they’re crass enough to function as cringe humor:

Another food comparison:

You might say, aha, I understood that reference!  “Snap, crackle, pop” is the classic slogan of Rice Krispies!  But no⁠—this entry was submitted from a .au email address, and as Masterchef Australia has taught me, Down Under they don’t have Rice Krispies.  They have Rice Bubbles.

(Also, I just noticed that I wrote “a .au email address” rather than “an .au email address”.  Why?  Because, clearly, “.au” is pronounced “dot ay you”, and thus does not start with a vowel sound.)

I’ve seen a number of sources declaring that in Germany, Rice Krispies go “knisper, knasper, knusper” instead of “snap, crackle, pop”, but I can’t find any evidence to support this.  On the contrary, I’ve found a picture of a Rice Kris­pies box with German text, but the little dudes’ costumes still say “Snap”, “Crackle”, and “Pop” on them.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Limes Germanicus:

And as long as we’re dipping into other languages:

Again, bonus points here for plausibility: this reminded me a bit too much of the last book I read for my visitor recommendation series.  At least this imaginary author is offering footnotes; the same cannot be said for our next one:

Though I do work with teens, I am not completely up to date with the parlance of our times.  So I looked up “schwifty” on Urban Dictionary, and the definition I found there explained that it “is akin to getting ‘crunk’”.  I tell ya, one day you wake up and everyone sounds like the Orz.

Here’s one that avoids sending readers like me to Urban Dictionary by being circumspect:

From an imaginary author who thinks that some terms are off-limits to some writers, we turn to one who thinks that some entire books are off-limits to some readers:

One thing I find interesting about this one is that I gather that it’s supposed to be funny because the imaginary author is so strident about something as innocuous as right-handedness.  But I would argue that even if you were to swap in a more serious issue, the stridency itself would keep this amusingly bad, because everything after the comma has crossed the event horizon into self-parody no matter what prompted it.

Here’s another case of humor that derives at least in part from stridency:

I said “in part” because I think there’s another aspect of language that this entry highlights as amusingly bad, as the repeated reference to “the spec­trum” showcases an example of euphemism by omission.  Historically, “the spectrum” by default meant the light spectrum.  The term is one of many that derive from the Latin specere, meaning “to look at”, and the use of “spectrum” to denote the band of colors that emerges from a prism dates to the 1670s.  The figurative sense of a continuum of anything dates to 1936.  In the 1980s, psychiatrist Lorna Wing introduced the world to the notion of an “autism spectrum” which included people with more or less severe examples of a condition she termed “Asperger’s syndrome”, and it wasn’t until 2013 that the DSM‑5 followed her lead and combined several previously distinct diagnoses into “autism spectrum disorder”.  And almost immediately, it became com­monplace for people to refer to “the autism spectrum” as simply “the spec­trum”⁠—i.e., removing the term that carries the most semantic information!  “I am on the spectrum”… what, the political spectrum? The socioeconomic spec­trum? The electromagnetic spectrum?  To try to get the phrase “the spec­trum” to default to “the autism spectrum” so that you don’t have to use the word “autism” suggests that you consider “autism” a pejorative that you have to tiptoe around.  And now I need to leave this boring paragraph.

So let’s turn to the remaining computer-generated entries.  What did the computers of 2023-2024 think would be good entries for this contest?  Well, they liked their sentences overwrought, for one:

This one is similar to the above, with some bonus wincing due to its focus on excretory functions:

I liked this one for its off-kilter phrasing, vaguely reminiscent of the interactive fiction story For a Change:

Poor Brian from a few entries ago certainly didn’t find serenity beneath the sun!

I will award a second-place finish in this division, as I quite liked the understatement here:

I know that sentence was computer generated, but I dunno⁠—there’s just something about it that tells me that the entrant must have had a top-notch education in world literature back in the day.

But here’s the winner of the computer-generated division:

The euphemism of portraying a stay in a hospice as the cusp of an exciting new adventure is bad enough, but to describe a hospice as “quirky” (and the nearby forest as “whimsical”) is the cherry on top.  And yet it’s not hard for me to imagine this as a TV series circa 1988 or so, with jaunty theme music, that wound up canceled after filming seven episodes (four unaired) due to its tone-deafness.

So, on to the remaining entries that repurposed pre-existing text of various sorts.  Though this one is sort of an edge case, in that it wasn’t ordered up in a large language model but apparently emerged as a series of smartphone autocompletes:

The vagueness is the heart of this entry, of course, but I also liked the reference to “the left side of town”.

Here’s one that looks like it could have been generated by a large language model trained on Elon-era Twitter:

One reason I like having the found division around is that it serves as a yardstick for what’s plausible.  Consider some of the overwrought entries above and from years past, and then look at this, which was actually published:

From start to finish, that looks as though it were written expressly for this contest.  From “no humble abode” to “married” to “brandishing the added illicitness”, it’s just a string of oofs, as the kids say.  Do the kids still say that?  Is my word choice sufficiently schwifty?

Well, here’s someone for whom no word choice would do:

And here’s an instance of a new word being coined? I guess?:

This next one is just about perfect for this contest, but that stands to reason⁠—it’s deliberately bad writing, part of a parody of romance novels:

While this one, the winner of the found division for 2024, seems to have been written in all earnestness:

As bad opening sentences go, if one is “not so bad” and ten is “really bad”, this clearly rates an eleven.

And that wraps it up for Lyttle Lytton 2024!  Many thanks to all the entrants and to all who help spread the word about this contest, and in particular to those who help support it by sending a few cents (or more, in some cases!) to my Patreon account.  The contest reopens as soon as I post this, so whether you find yourself among the winners above, missed the cut this year, or are discovering Lyttle Lytton for the first time, you have not only my permission but my encouragement to enter the 2025 edition.  It is for you!

And this is the part where I tend to plug some of my own work; last year, for instance, it was my then-new names site.  But this year I’d like to give a shout-out to a couple of fun Lyttle Lytton fan sites.  One is by 2022 winner Elle Spohrer, who has put together a set of book covers based on past Lyttle Lytton entries.  And then there’s this project, billed as “A list by merton”, that pairs record albums with Lyttle Lytton winners dating back to the beginning of the contest, and it’s pretty astonishing.  So check ’em out!  I fully expect the cre­ator of the album site to somehow dig up a short-lived indie folk trio called the Acoustic Lemons.