Let us celebrate the limerick, a highly disciplined exercise in light verse that is the most popular fixed poetic form indigenous to the English language. While other basic forms of poetry, such as the sonnet, ode and haiku, are borrowed from other countries, the limerick is an original English creation and the most quoted of all verse forms in our language.
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.
—Vivian Holland
Despite Holland’s opinion about limericks, even the clean ones can be comical. Within the brief com of five lines, the ditty can tell an engaging story or make a humorous statement compactly and cleverly. It has been estimated that at least a million limericks — good, mediocre and indelicate — are in existence today.
By definition, a limerick is a nonsense poem of five anapestic lines, of which lines one, two and five are of three feet and rhyme and lines three and four are of two feet and rhyme. Unaccented syllables can be added to the beginning and/or end of any line. Here is the classic limerick stanza:
da DA da da DA da da DA
da DA da da DA da da DA
da DA da da DA
da DA da da DA
da DA da da DA da da DA.
And here’s my limerick about my role as your fly-by-the-roof-of-the-mouth -friendly language columnist:
I’ll try to write something that’s betterer,
Or my name isn’t Richard H. Lederer.
My grammar’s definitive:
I’ll unsplit your infinitive
And undangle your participle, etceterer.
So let’s have a contest. I invite you to email me ([email protected]; don’t forget the h) your best limericks about Christmas. One, two or three submissions per contestant. Feel free to include Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, Frosty the Snowman, elves, Rudolph and the other reindeer, et al. Limericks must be original and on topic and will be judged on humor, rhymes and accuracy of meter. Deadline for submission: Please include your full address December 18, and please, please be sure to identify the San Diego community you live in.
For whatever help it may be, here’s my humble Christmas contribution:
I hope it won’t come as a shock
That Christmas I hazard to mock:
It’s the one day that we
Sit around a dead tree
Eating candy right out of a sock.
The three winning contestants will each receive a signed and personally inscribed copy of my new book, A Treasury of Christmas Humor. A selection of your submitted limericks will be gift-wrapped for the public to read in my Christmas Day column.
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Yikes! Sacré bleu! Oy vay! Just when you thought that COVID fatigue might be in the rear-view mirror, the omicron variant (named after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet) is stabbing its spikes into our lives. The most widespread pronunciation of the variant in America is OH-muh-krahn. Less common, but still acceptable, are AH-muh-krahn, OH-mee-krahn and OH-my-krahn.
Tellingly, an anagram of all the letters in omicron is moronic. Why? Because these relentless variants are a moronic way of teaching Americans the Greek alphabet.
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The publishers of the Oxford dictionaries have chosen vax as the 2021 Word of the Year. “The word vax, more than any other, has injected itself into the bloodstream of the English language in 2021.” While vaccinations can be a sticking point, the jabs, shots and Fauci ouchies are also a shot in the arm to our collective health.
