You couldn’t write a sentence this bad IF YOU TRIED.
Or could you?
I hadn’t heard of the Lyttle Lytton Bad Sentence Contest (run by Adam Cadre for 22 years!) till this morning, but poring over this year’s winners, coffee in hand, was just the break from doomscrolling I needed. Ranging from the politically timely—“The doors of my heart were as closed as those of the Capitol, that morning of January 6th.”—to the breastily awkward—“My Tinder fling’s breasts vibrated with horniness as her lithe frame slivered out of her tiny black dress.”—to the truly, gnomically beautiful—“Boom boom pow, went my car’s elite sound system as I blasted the 2009 hot summer hit, ‘Boom Boom Pow.’”—each of these semantic crimes is either conjured up from the muck of contestants’ brains, or found in the wild and submitted anonymously.
My personal favorite? The one that had me snorting so loud the cat crawled under the couch? This one, submitted anonymously: “Not unlike how mitochondria gives energy to the cell, Alice gave energy to John’s heart and penis, both of whom containing dozens of cells.”
Sadly, it did not win. That honor went to Elle Spohrer, who carved this wondrous piece of lexical horror from the darkest chambers of her heart: “Jason and Laura may have loved each other, but they were as sharply different as Pacific and Atlantic.”
So simple. SO BAD. A+.
