The other night I signed in to The New Yorker so that I could enter the weekly caption contest, only to find that I’d missed the deadline. Dang it. But of course there was a new cartoon waiting for a caption, so I took a shot at that one.
I came up with four ideas, which I showed to the fam. They all liked idea #4 best, but Marshall thought it needed a different (opposite, in fact) verb. I took Marshall’s advice and rewrote the caption to work better with that verb. I hope I made the right choice. I will be very annoyed if someone wins with a punchline involving my original verb choice.
That could happen. The exact wording matters. In the preceding contest, I submitted a caption that said, “Looks like my train finally turned up” (or something very similar to that–I didn’t keep a record of it). Someone else submitted a caption that said, “See, I knew the train would turn up soon.” Same joke, different wording. And their caption, not mine, was chosen as a finalist. 🙁