Limericks

When I saw today's contribution on Wordsmith.org " A. Word. A. Day." with Anu Garg, I couldn't help myself but copy a god bit over from that amazing site that has enlightened me and my vocabulary for a number of years now. It's free by the way and comes highly recommended. Would you know for example what to sashay means or where it comes from, to promulgate, or opprobrium, mythomane, sitzkrieg or even turgid just to name a few?

There is a new word every day from changing categories, loan words, their pronunciation and etymology explained.
Well, you know the meaning of this one, but here goes:

MEANING:

noun: A humorous, often risque, verse of three long (A) and two short (B) lines with the rhyme scheme AABBA. 

NOTES:

Here’s how someone has described a limerick:

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

Did you see the one I posted recently on Facebook?

There was a young lady from Riga
who rode with a smile on a tiger

they returned from the ride

with the lady inside

and a smile on the face of the tiger.

        I used to live near Limerick for about over 10 years on lovely Lough Derg on an organic farm and teach at UL (University of Limerick). To my astonishment, the locals were not wildly conversant in limericks or had one up their sleeve. Some never even knew what I meant. The Little book of Naughty Limericks I eventually spotted was  a rare find but not even a particularly good nor naughty one in site of the title.

For Usage, read on!

USAGE:

“First of all, the limerick judges at this newspaper would like contestants to know that we are acutely aware that ‘Journal’ rhymes with ‘urinal’. Almost as much fun as reading limericks was reading excuses from the people who wrote the limericks. It was as if we had caught someone reading the S ex With Aliens Weekly at the supermarket. Diane Harvey, of DeForest, for example, began her entrant thusly:

It is with a deep sense of shame that I submit the following puerile, low-brow limericks, and confess the guilty pleasure I had in writing them. As one who normally leads a completely respectable life, I cannot tell you what an illicit thrill it was to shed the trappings of responsible adulthood and for a ‘brief shining moment’ indulge in rude juvenile humor once again.

“Several writers put the ‘Journal-urinal’ rhyme to obvious use, and a few similarly included good-humored critiques of columnist George Hesselberg, as in the one by Dan Barker, of Madison: 

There once was a parrot named Colonel,
Who read all the papers diurnal.
But his favorite page
On the floor of his cage
Was the Hesselberg page from the Journal.” 

Now bookmark the page and subscribe whether you are a writer or not. I promise you're in for a treat! Ask Anu Lal, my co-editor. Have any good ones?

Let me add one of my own limericks created after a particularly outstanding matchmaking request; however, I couldn't come up with the goods...:)

A virgin farmer from Newcastle West
at 68 want'd to put his genes to the test
with a colleen in her thirties
to produce little Berties
a child anyway, but a male heir at his best.

 A big thank you to this wonderful free site!
Siggy Buckley