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

How Becoming Human Saved an Alien

by Suellen Zima

When author Matt Haig was personally “living in a state of intense but irrational fear,” he conceived of a story in the year 2000 about an alien who voluntarily becomes a human and lives as happily ever after as an alien turned human can.   It makes for a thoughtful, sometimes humorous book entitled, “The Humans” finally published in 2013 after the author became famous through four other books.  It caught my eye because I am in the process of creating a friendship between an alien and a human in the new book I’m writing.
I loved the way the story evolved through twists and turns and never quite predictable events.  Haig presented an alien’s down to earth view of humans and their foibles.   He develops an appreciation of human relationships through a series of strange events.  Multi-dimensional humans and the complications of the human condition intrigue the main character beyond his ability to remain an alien.
He leaves a list of “Advice for a Human” for a mixed-up teen that could have been his son.  He summarizes succinctly, but deeply, sage advice worth every human’s consideration.  Number 6 is “Be Curious.  Question everything.  A present fact is just a future fiction.”  In number 9, he wisely points out, “Sometimes, to be yourself you will have to forget yourself and become something else.  Your character is not a fixed thing.  You will sometimes have to move to keep up with it.”
With his alien’s wisdom, he says, “You shouldn’t have been born.  Your existence is as close to impossible as can be.  To dismiss the impossible is to dismiss yourself.”  And, from his personal experience, he says “One life-form’s gold is another life-form’s tin can.”  His knowledge of the future says, “New technology, on Earth, just means something you will laugh at in five years.  Value the stuff you won’t laugh at in five years.  Like love.  Or a good poem.  Or a song.  Or the sky.”
With pithy wit, he points out, “If there is a sunset, stop and look at it.  Knowledge is finite.  Wonder is infinite.”  With the certainty of knowing humans as only an alien can, he points out, “You are not the most intelligent creature in the universe.  You are not even the most intelligent creature on your planet.  The tonal language in the song of the humpback whale displays more complexity than the entire works of Shakespeare.  It is not a competition.  Well, it is.  But don’t worry about it.”
With the power of seeing the future, he predicts, “One day humans will live on Mars.  But nothing there will be more exciting than a single overcast morning on Earth.”  And, “In a thousand years, if humans survive that long, everything you know will have been disproved.  And replaced by even bigger myths.”
As an author, I love the paradox he explains in number 46 — “The things you don’t need to live — books, art, cinema, wine, and so on — are the things you need to live.”  His perceptive advice in number 66 says “As a black hole forms, it creates an immense gamma-ray burst, blinding whole galaxies with light and destroying millions of worlds.  You could disappear at any second.  This one.  Or this one.  Or this one.  Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.”
If I had to pick only one, I particularly like, “Men are not from Mars.  Women are not from Venus.  Do not fall for categories.  Everyone is everything.  Every ingredient inside a star is inside you, and every personality that ever existed competes in the theater of your mind for the main role.”
Matt Haig makes you glad you are human.

Suellen Zima

Follow the Senior Hummingbird

…as she wanders, wonders, and writes