[Note: This limerick contest is now over. See foot of post for updates.]
It’s competition time at Sentence first! All you have to do is write a limerick about language and add it in a comment to this post, and you’ll be in the running for a Kindle or some fine books on language. First, a word about our sponsors.
Sponsors:
Sponsoring the contest and supplying the prizes are the good people at Stack Exchange, a community-based Q&A website. At SE, people ask questions, answers are discussed, edited, and voted on, and so the most helpful rise to the top. There are sections on cooking, maths, photography, programming – all sorts of special interests, including:
Click the pic to visit. The English Language and Usage page has a lively turnover of questions on usage, etymology, semantics, pronunciation, dialects, phrases, and other such topics; the FAQ offers a useful introduction. It’s a friendly, informative kind of place. Some example discussions:
Why is q followed by a u?
Why are there inconsistencies in the pronunciation of the alphabet?
What is the origin of ZOMG?
Can doubt sometimes mean question?
Did English ever have a formal version of you?
Origins of the word bug in Software.
Proverb or expression for a situation with two choices, both leading to a different kind of trouble.
Here’s one relevant to our competition:
What is it about English that makes it favourable for writing limericks?
And one that caught my eye from the Science Fiction & Fantasy page:
How does Superman shave?
I think it’s an addictive place to browse partly because whatever one person is curious about, others will be curious about. Try it and see.
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Guidelines:
And so to business. Lauren, who manages the English Language & Usage page, recently got in touch to propose a contest; I suggested limericks, and now it’s your turn.
Limericks should be of normal length, rhythm, and rhyming scheme, more or less. You probably know the structure well. Wikipedia has the basics, and I’m glad to see it cites Gershon Legman, whose thorough and spectacularly rude two-volume collection I read this year. But do please resist this tradition – keep your compositions family friendly, and ignore Morris Bishop’s characterisation:
The limerick is furtive and mean;
You must keep her in close quarantine,
Or she sneaks to the slums
And promptly becomes
Disorderly, drunk and obscene.
Should your muse linger, you can submit 2–3 limericks – but no more! They should be original, and in English. The theme is language: writing, grammar, usage, style, and so on. Anything language-y or linguistic, so long as it entertains. Rhymes should be close but need not be precise. Inventiveness is encouraged; repeating a rhyme (à la Lear) is not.
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Prizes:
First prize is a Kindle, Amazon’s popular e-book reader. I hear they’re all the rage.
Second prize (A) is two new books I haven’t yet read but look forward to reading: Robert Lane Greene’s You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity (praised by Language Hat here); and Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl’s 101 Misused Words You’ll Never Confuse Again (commended by John E. McIntyre here).
Second prize (B) is two older books I have read, and to which I often refer: T. P. Dolan’s wonderful A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, described by Tom Paulin as “a pioneering work of scholarship”; and the great Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, which Geoffrey K. Pullum calls “the finest work of scholarship on English grammar and usage I have ever seen.”
Prizes can only be sent to western Europe, continental U.S., and Canada. I’m sorry if that’s a problem for some readers. You can’t enter if you’re related to me or work for Stack Exchange; otherwise, go for it. It’s impossible to be objective about poetry, so if I can’t choose clear winners I’ll narrow it down a bit and pick three at random.
You don’t have to spread the word through social media – or traditional speech or gesture – but I’d love if you did: the more entries, the more fun for all.
Today is Monday 12 September; the deadline is Friday 23 September. Winners to be announced the week after, in an update to this post. In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter, if you’re the tweeting type.
Thanks for reading, and good luck!
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Update 1: The contest is now closed. Thank you all very much for submitting poems and spreading the word. I’ve had great fun reading the limericks (over 130 of them!), marvelling at their wit and ingenuity.
I’ll make a shortlist of the ones I’m most impressed by and will draw lots for the prizes. Winners will be announced next week. Comments are closed until then.
Some of you will be interested to know that Stack Exchange now has a Linguistics page.
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Update 2: So many good limericks were entered, I wish I had more prizes to give. Ten times more. But I’m happy to announce the following three winners:
Second prize (B) goes to Mike Page:
If engaged in a contest with Inuit
in snow-naming, please, discontinue it!
We can hardly compete
Using “slush”, “powder”, “sleet”…
You’ve got to be Inuit to win you it!
for imaginative rhyming and inspired silliness. (Alongside his limerick I must recommend this essay (PDF) on Eskimo words for snow.)
Second prize (A) goes to Lisa Liel:
Grammarians like to explain
That the verbing of nouns is inane
But friending is fine
It’s no different in kind
Than contacting me to complain
More sense in 25 words than you can shake a derivational suffix at. (Note: after the verb contact (in the sense get in touch with) arose in the early 20th century, it was “greeted with open hostility by purists for several decades”, according to Robert Burchfield.)
First prize goes to Paraic O’Donnell:
There was once a pig’s ear of a language,
Romance scraps in a Jerry-built sandwich.
Mostly used for rude jokes,
It became for some folks
Something nothing was seriouser than which.
for fine philological punning and wonderful syntactical funning that made me laugh much longer than I ought to admit.
Congratulations to Mike, Lisa, and Paraic, thanks to Stack Exchange for their generosity, and thank you all again for taking part!
Sentence first 
There was a French girl in the park
Who enjoyed crossing words at dark
Bumped into a bat
Hold on to her hat
The bat munched the hat like a shark!
Inflection can go up or down
And make a king sound like a clown.
Wrong tone is evinced
When you sound unconvinced:
“It looks like that kid’s going to drown?”
(I’m on twitter as @TonyNoland, and limericks are a hobby)
If you say you’re a big verbivore,
But you don’t know your you’re from your your,
And you’re not sure just when
To use than or use then,
Then I think you should be reading more.
To write about language, a joy
With so many words to employ
But where do I start
When I haven’t the heart
And I’m feeling a little bit coy?
I before E except after C
Is a brief weighed down with fallacies
There’s a freight of deceipt
When the rule is received:
It is seismic to society
Cathy I ask where is the beef
I think you could improve it if
You called out his name
Without a drop of shame
And here he’d come : your dear Heathcliff!
Please don’t say that our language is easy,
For it’s grammar and words leave me queasy.
Be it bough, through or cough,
Or tough, rough or trough
It’s rules make me feel quite uneasy.
(@NettieWriter)
Verbing a noun seems askew,
But nouning a verb isn’t new;
Like “paint” and “to rest”
Our language is blessed
With a flexible usage or two.
(I’ll stop at two limericks.)
Frau Grammarian lost all her bloom
When her young charges botched “who” and “whom.”
“Woe is me!” said the Frau
“Where’s the point to life now?”
So they etched “their there they’re” on her tomb.
English pedants go squiffy
When they find that your usage is whiffy
They say “Don’t use that word!”
“When you do it’s absurd!”
What they need is a trip up the Liffey.
“You Yankees,” the Englishman said,
Bemusedly shaking his head.
“I never could see
Pronouncing it ‘Z’;
It ought to be spoken as ‘Z’!”
The thing to remember about grammar
Is that you need to approach with a hammer.
If not then your commas
Look as though dropped by bombers
And will give your poor reader a stammer.
Linguistics is about human language
In a limerick this gives us a pang, which,
between dictionary and ear,
means no rhymes will appear
So we have to invent new word-slang-age.
In English you can write many limericks
Because of the language’s curious metrics
It goes up and down
and makes all the right sounds
Is to do with all the anapestics
There was a young lady called Annie,
Whose talent for grammar was uncanny.
Until one dark day
Her apostrophe went astray
And she shouted out ‘now let’s eat Granny!’
Pedants stop! And all think again.
When our forebears were callow young men
Their arse was whipped tender
If they wrote “an agenda” –
Pedants said it was plural back then.
A simple young waiter called Egad
whose reading and writing was so bad
caused lots of confusion
at the family reunion
when Grammar was placed next to Grandad
There once was a lady abroad
who obviously hadn’t been taught
the correct rules to write and wasn’t so bright
“But I can still enter” she faught.
I have but a few years to go
My mind is getting a bit slow
Words jump here and there
And go everywhere
And never obey a No No!
In the South the folks say ya’ll.
They eat okra, biscuits, and slaw.
Am not becomes ain’t.
Can not becomes cain’t.
It is often said with a drawl.
Auto-antonyms, sanction I must:
When I dust, I may add or take dust!
“Yeah, right!”‘s your impression,
But this begs the question,
And leaves me now feeling nonplussed.
@NemaVeze
[…] to Stan Carey’s limerick contest: Auto-antonyms, sanction I must: When I dust, I may add or take dust! “Yeah, right!”‘s your […]
In English I thought we were taught no lies,
always cross the t’s and dot the i’s…
Also that “i” came before “e”
…except after “c”…
and so I ended up doing Science!
“Now Paddy,” said Seamus McGrew,
“just look on this advert would you:
Dese blokes in ‘ere tell us
dey’re wantin’ tree fellers –
’tis a pity we’re only two…”
When I asked the Maitre d’
what might the green soup b’
called..errr…, ‘petitt poyse’?
he said, “Shhh! Less noise!
Some think it tastes like p’ !”
A precocious young daughter from Slough
would harass her mum as to how
it should be called ‘Sluff’;
yelled her mum, “That’s enough!”
smirked the brat, “Don’t you mean ‘that’s enow’ ??”
Throw me down the stairs, my shoes.
Awkward, I know.
But, upstairs I won’t go.
I’m shoeicidal,
And too full of booze.
A professor once scribbled a note
On the grammar of what others wrote
“The spelling is dismal
The punctuation, abysmal
To learning your craft, please devote!”
While playing a game of Twister,
Mike grabbed Jen and kissed her.
She like it a lot,
Now they’re tying the knot,
Next month they’ll be Mrs. and Mr.
(This was my wedding invitation!)
It must always be ‘I’ before ‘E’
Except when they’re following ‘C’
It happens each time
As true as this rhyme
Except when it actually isn’t
oops, not about language, sorry didn’t read the instructions carefully! Disregard entry :(
I truly don’t mean to pick nits-
Punctuation can give a girl fits!
But remember this, please
About apostrophes:
When possessive, it’s not “it’s,” it’s “its.”
There once was a poet named Dryden,
Whose language beliefs were quite strident,
He said with a snort,
Latin forms, I report,
English must always be tried in.
There was a young man named Dipple
Who after working, decided to sipple.
Pulling his specs from his glove,
Read the above,
And said, “Oh my, a dangling participle!”
…with a wink at Nettie, above. I’m not sure why mine didn’t post in limerick lines. I’m literate, but sadly not computer-literate!
The irate grammarian said
(as he slapped himself upside the head),
“Sentence structure’s awry,
punctuation’s gone bye.
Guess the rules for good writing are dead!”
No one seems to be good at this language
In fact most people are below average
It’s a wonder you see
that you comprehend me
most people who speak it often sound savage
“A limerick’s last line should be concise.”
-“In my opinion, funny should suffice.”
“What about rhyme?”
-“Not that important, I find…”
Then we got into a huge fight that lasted for hours, talking about poetic license and what not, but after a while we just agreed to disagree and cracked open a couple of beers.
There was an old man who thought
my friends sound different when they talk.
And it depends if they are in; the North, South, East or West.
So who is it then, that speaks English the best?
Is it You’uns in the North, or Ya’ll in the South?
Who is that speaks the correct words from their mouth?
So he called all his friends together.
And asked them to discuss it with each other.
Then all this commotion erupted.
And the old man decided, HIS thought was corrupted.
So the old man announces:
All this is nonsense.
Just listen to me.
Everyone, please be quiet!
It is too noisy!
Yes, that is the way.
It sounds best when everyone has little to say.
There was an old man who thought my friends sound different when they talk.
And it depends if they live in the north, south east or west.
So, who is it than that speaks English the best?
Is it You’uns in the North or Ya’ll in the South?
Who is that speaks the correct words from their mouth?
So he called his friends together.
And asked them to discuss it with each other.
Then all this commotion erupted.
And the old man decided
HIS thought was corrupted.
Then he announces; all this is nonsense.
Everyone, listen to me!
Please be quiet, It is too noisy!
Yes that is the way.
It sounds best when everyone has little to say.
Use words well, I beg of you
Punctuation isn’t hard to do
A period or comma
Eliminates drama
And makes you sound smarter, too!
Never keen to be one of the chorus,
I went and I got a thesaurus.
Now I traipse when I walk,
and I prate when I talk,
but I can’t find a word for “Don’t bore us.”
There once was a boy from near Brighton
Whose spelling could surely one frighten
Always “e” before “i”
Even “pei” over “pie”
But he still won the Bee spelling “heighten.”
what can I do? I’m hooked on limericks and just had to enter another….
“me” – an object impressive
“my” – an adject possessive
“mine, all mine…
gerrofit, ‘smine
all mine” – an abject obsessive.
Alanis was drinking a tonic
While writing a song called “Ironic”.
Her wedding day’s rain,
Like traffic, a pain.
The laughter she caused was sardonic.
There was once a pig’s ear of a language,
Romance scraps in a Jerry-built sandwich.
Mostly used for rude jokes,
It became for some folks
Something nothing was seriouser than which.
A young lass with a southern drawl
Once referred to me as ya’ll
But when I looked around
No one else could be found
Nor did anyone answer my call
So I gave the young lass a big grin
After all dialect’s not a sin
And she gave me a smile
And we walked down the aisle
And then she died in the towers called twin
There once was a sharp-witted editor
Whose knowledge always would credit her
She knew “their” from “there”
And was willing to share
Since that’s what an editor edits for.
In matters linguistic it’s clear
Orthography ain’t what you hear
The vowels they do shift
“Can’t cope with this rift!
Pass the IPA,” she said, “be a dear.”
Spelling, you always manage to ruin my day,
with your most inconsistent and incompetent way,
I before E, except after C, this is what they see,
But ceiling has ei after C, this is what I can see,
There is exception to this rule, despite what they say.
This college professor, a doctor,
Would write the exams that she’d proctor.
When grading them after,
She died from the laughter
Caused by the bad grammar; it shocked her.
I looked in Misters Strunk ‘n White,
but what I’d thunk just wasn’t right.
‘s why I brung their guide
To help me decide
How to teach my students to write (good).
If you’re a self-ascribed grammarian,
Relax! Don’t be so contrarian.
If I screw up a comma,
There’s no need, for drama
For heaven’s sake we’re all post-lapsarian.
Oh apostrophe, you tailed, floating dot
You’re confusing to people, a lot!
With possession & contraction
Please spring into action
But with the plurals, do not!
Here are three limerick submissions. Thanks!
Sometimes grammar rules feel like a yoke,
Like a jailer you’re dying to poke.
Though they live for a reason,
To break them ain’t treason.
Cuz guidelines are meant to be broke.
Edward Lear was a poet quite witty,
Who wrote verse rather brief, even bitty.
His birthday’s 12 May,
So we treasure that day
In thanks for the limerick ditty.
A man who was lacking in wit
Bought a magnetized poetry kit.
Penning poor verse galore,
He wrote more — what a bore!
And ignored those who begged him to quit.
There was a girl learning English
To be was been To fight fought fish
Adjectives before
All accents ashore
And let the vocal chords flourish!
There once was a girl from East Hilltop
Whose punctuation begged her to stop!
Her commas, went awry,
Question marks asking why???
Finally left her with just writer’s block
My Bostonian sweetie says “water”
As those good old New Englanders taught her.
But me, I say “water”
As Philly folks should-er
And so we both speak as we oughta.
@NemaVeze
She said she had stopped using “he”
She said she had stopped using “she”
“It’s not you, it’s me,” was the reply
When I asked about her and I
So now I’ve had to stop using “we”
Happiness fades over time,
And moping around is a crime.
But a limerick a day
keeps a bad mood away
‘Cause life only gets better with rhyme!
@terpteach
I once took a class on good writin’
My sentences they were a frightenin’
My commas were tangling
Modifiers were dangling
I’s expelled for apostrophe writin’
Old English may seem quite absurd
with many an erudite word.
When Shakespeare was King,
he considered it Bling
but then again, he WAS a nerd.
Oh look @ theez teens now a dayz
Their in a writin rebellious phaze
They dont seem very wize
Barely know Wen to CaPiTaLiZe
Readin there writin iz like solvin a maze
When proofreading great men of letters
Remember they think they’re your betters.
They wrote it? They meant it!
A rule broke? They ‘bent’ it!
The editors they like are stetters.
And a second one:
In matters linguistic and verbal
I’m often reduced to a burble
I try for a word
But it comes out absurd
Having stuck in my throat like a furball
The English language is a beautiful thing
When waxed lyrically can make the heart sing
But I weep when I hear
Jaxx, Quag, Moonbeam and Speare
As first names for wide-eyed offspring
People write limericks all the time
To be witty is an uphill climb
But they don’t make the lines
9/5/5/5/9
It’s as much about rhythm as rhyme!
…and a little self-criticism:
…………………………………….
These lim’ricks have lots of potential
To delve into matters essential
But a verse about verse
Goes from better to worse-
It’s exceedingly self-referental.
This here will be metalinguistic
Compulsive were orders as is tic
A disorder of rhyme
You’re the reader and I’m
Finishing all like cataclysmic
The bird on the ground ’twas a plover
laid one egg and then laid another
when asked for a clue
as to why there were two
she said one good tern deserves another
The bird on the ground ’twas a plover
laid one egg and then laid its brother
when asked for a clue
as to why there were two
she said one good tern deserves another
this is a do – over for the previous
The humble three dots, or ellipses
Were discovered by Hungarian gypsies
The gals needed a way
To keep periods at bay
When crossing over mountains and seas
To conjugate a verb is absurd
Said the infinitive to the adverb
You may think it’s a farce
But there’s no need to parse
I’m fine as I am, in a word
A lexicographer from Leeds was displeased
When his inkwell spilled out on his knees
In order to spell
He had to repel
The lint causing papers to crease
All pedants who wind up in hell
Are no longer able to spell
And each anguished cry
Becomes txt: “y god y?
jk! OMG! LOL!!!”
Not an entry (as I’m Stan’s mate) but just a quick and silly limerick inspired by Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener.
——————
There was a young man who ‘would prefer not to’
And this worked his boss into a to-do.
‘Bart,’ said the boss,
‘Could you tell me the cost
Were we all to prefer not to too?’
There is sadly no cause to rejoice
For that ill-starred grammatical voice;
There are folk who speak as if
Verbs put in the passive
Were almost an immoral choice.
The rules for use and mechanics
Are obeyed by linguistic fanatics.
But others, misled,
Stand the rules on their heads
And cause scholars to froth into a panic.
Ok, I couldn’t resist just one more:
There once was a phrase from Nantucket,
With a term that rhymed well with “bucket,”
And it’ll show you
Just what you can do,
When you know how words are conducted.
Thanks for the contest!
There once was a man from St. Bees
Who got stung on the arm by a wasp.
When asked, “Does it hurt?”
He replied, “No, it doesn’t.
“I’m so glad it wasn’t a hornet.”
“A noun-disguised-verb? A gerund?”
Said the Jester to the Baron.
“It cannot be ME…
The wrong pronoun, see?
MY chaffing’s what keeps you glarin’.”
Oh, what a problem is “it’s”
It’s driving me out of my wits
When “its” means “belong”
the apostrophe’s wrong
but students think “its” is the pits!
I wish that my name were Lynne Truss
who, spotting this error in us,
put it all in a book –
you should have a look,
She made a few million thus.
When a young college student named Olin
Asked his father what he should enroll in—
“English or pre-med?”—
Dad chuckled and said,
“Either way you’ll be studying colons.”
And another:
“You know, humans these days are misleading,”
Said the bird to his brother while feeding.
“They write books and build schools,
give their languages rules,
And then they spend all their time tweeting.”
[…] Stan over at the Sentence First blog is running a limerick contest until Friday, September 23rd. First prize is a Kindle so put […]
Ignor my first submit.
And he took the keys to his car
The bartender thought he had gone too far
That it did make him think
He had so many drinks
A time traveler walked into a bar
Winnebago and Timbuktu
Are good words to use if you
Are feeling too thick
To write a limerick
And instead want to write a haiku
This lame attempt at an entry
Doesn’t seem like it will win to me
It going along rhyming
Has impeccable timing
But ends too soon.
My third and final entry:
Said the copy desk chief to his manager,
“This newspaper’s gone to the canister.
Our stories are clunkers,
Our writers are drunkards,
And our editors, bah—they’re all grammateurs!”
The language police should be Tazing
The people who text awkward phrasings –
Conventions grammatical
sent on Sabbatical?:
It’s linguistic-edifice-razing!
A singer’s a person who sings,
And a swinger’s a person who swings,
That’s easy to see –
So then why can’t it be
That a finger’s a person who fings?
It’s agreed we conceive a conception,
And receivers receive at receptions,
But it’s not clams that clamor,
And not hams that hammer,
So do not believe those beleptions.
My name is Hans.
She said: Ha ha Hands
and hence called me Fingers.
I tell you that lingers
and caused me some rants.
“Until Friday,” she’d said, so I queried
“You’ll be writing all week?!” I was worried.
“No, I’ll do it on Thursday,
you’ll have it on Friday.”
“By Friday, then, fine.” Out I hurried.
another:
Krashen wrote about acquisition
being outside the realm of tuition
which made me morose
and take a whole course
which was fine – but I’m still no magician.
There can never be any consensus
Whether German will lull English senses
Russell Smith got it right
Spoken softly by night
by a beauty it surely mends fences.
English grammar seems easy at first,
but as soon as you’re really immersed
in adverbials and tenses
the panic commences
and you feel like you have just been cursed.
[…] and sundry other lingusitic habitats is holding a limerick competition – yeah! – and there are some really great ones there, don’t miss them. Deadline: September […]
(please ignore title, if not allowed!)
LOCUTION, LOCUTION, LOCUTION
A dyslexic Kenyan called Toby
Moved his mud hut to Spain from Nairobi
But the rain on the plain
Soaked his humble domain
And he cried, “Now I’ve no fixed adobe!”
There once was a mischievous comma
Who created political drama
When it jumped in the air
And just hung up there
And our Pres became Irish O’Bama.
[…] while you’re at it, check out the limerick contest at Sentence First, also sponsored by Stack Exchange English Language and […]
OK, I can’t resist trying a third one:
When you’re a stylistic obsessive,
You see words and get all possessive.
If a line’s badly phrased
Then your hackles get raised
And your voice becomes passive-aggressive.
Grammarians like to explain
That the verbing of nouns is inane
But friending is fine
It’s no different in kind
Than contacting me to complain
Mark Twain once insisted that German
Was “awful.” What set the man squirmin’?
For the true anglophone
German’s grammar alone
Hard to determine the meaning can make.
When we transcend this world of meat
Will language become obsolete?
Will we transmit our thoughts
With just ones and with noughts,
And send poetry down to defeat?
There was a young man from Japan
Whose limericks never would scan
When asked why this was
He answered, “Because
I always try to get as many syllables in the last line as I possibly can.”
Break’s my favorite word to say,
Use it for bread, recess, and crime each day,
It can be done to feet and also the heat,
So getting a break makes my day
OK, here’s a heavily self-referential one about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Rhyme works better if Sapir is stressed on first syllable (as it may well be?). The word “her” in the last line should ideally be italicised (not possible here), to attract metrical (and conceptual) stress:
Refuting the theory of Sapir
and Whorf, made one linguist much happier.
Being English, what buoyed her
was that “Schadenfreude”
caught her thought in prose so much snappier.
Prescriptivists are sometimes blue
But just look at their point of view
Descriptivists might
Not always be right
But they’ll re-write the rules ’til it’s true.
The Australian geek was a wonder
And of puns there was nobody fonder
When he downloaded files
He’d say with a smile
That they came from a LAN down under.
1:
If I’d know the rule then I would of
Told Sheila, ’cause she really should of
Used “have” in the place
Of “of” in the race
To win, and she really might could of.
2:
The plural of moose is moose.
But geese is the plural of goose.
Two teeth, but one tooth.
Many hooves, but one hoof.
But never three lose and one loose.
Please add an “e” to “geese”. #spelling #fail
I like the first one best:
As Lord Byron attempted expansion
Of his broken-down ancestral mansion,
All the builders demurred
‘Cause of debts he’d incurred
And his flagrant abuse of traditional scansion.
– – – – – –
The roué for her virtue was angling,
But struck out with his pickup-line-mangling.
With a giggle she said,
As she patted his head,
“Don’t look now, but your part’ciple’s dangling.”
– – – – – –
When he noticed a missing apostrophe
From the sign by the town’s rusting hoss trough, he
Drew his six-shooter, fired,
Got the look he desired.
“Pardner, now it is not a catostrophe!”
A serial comma its role had to ponder
So to the hills he went off for a wander
Will my absence be missed,
If I’m not in each list?
He asked as he disappeared yonder.
There once was an apostrophe lover
Whose grand boasts were believed by his brother
But his its and his it’s
Got mangled and mixed
When he tried to write lies to his mother.
A sentence is made of words,
put together by literary nerds.
They comma and exclaim,
And even hyphen to fame.
via colon and regurgitating gerds.
If disparaged by proud Esquimaux
For having so few words for snow
Just concede, don’t be miffed,
Keep it cool, get my drift?
Show you know how to go with the floe.
A young story-teller, named Ella,
Wrote, at nine, a best-seller novella,
Then just two years it took her
To win the Mann-Booker,
Now Ella’s a stellar Nobeler.
Dammit, I cannot make the second line scan…
There was once a Galwegian gent
Who said: ‘not a word’s not an arg[u]ment.
‘Don’t let it perturb
‘Cos noun’s gonna verb
‘Irregardless of how much you vent.’
Words are like meaning-filled buckets
If they spill, they’re “seeming”-filled pockets
One tries to be clear
But it’s harder each year
To be clear of feelings in topics
(Entry 2, posted like a late eBay bid)
My second entry for the day, better late than never – heh! heh!: Consonants they are twenty one,
chasing five vowels on the run.
From the Tilde to a Question,
They make their confession.
In sentences and rhyme, having fun
Upon others, grammar rules I’m deploying;
With their syntax I’m usually toying.
But they don’t show respect,
Or even genuflect —
In fact, most call me annoying :-/
And a last one. I need closure.
There once was a writer from Cheshire
Who was desperate for riches and treasure
Now her brain’s filled with poor rhymes
And badly-behaved lines
And she’s abandoned all hope for some leisure.
BB
When marking childrens English essays,
Hallelujahs and loud yodellays!
The grammar excels,
Great magic spells,
But the content is **** (please paraphrase).
Marcus West
As a tit-loving twitcher I ponder
A distinct part of speech as I wander,
It has meanings ambiguous,
And concepts contiguous:
Ah the joy of the double entendre!
Oh, heck. Here’s another one:
Superfluous commas, are bad
Wrong apostrophe’s make me quite sad
But between you and I
(“You and *me*,” you may cry)
“It’s” for “its” drives me stark raving mad!
Some more on linguistic relativism:
If engaged in a contest with Inuit
in snow-naming, please, discontinue it!
We can hardly compete
Using “slush”, “powder”, “sleet”…
You’ve got to be Inuit to win you it!
There once was a snail called Fargo
Who asked to be called “escargot”
But all his friends jeered
They snickered and sneered
Poor Fargo just couldn’t go far as “escargot.”
When Pronouns Date
When they met he was so demonstrative
Then possessive and interrogative
With slurs personal
And hate reciprocal
She found they were no longer relative
There once was a master of grammar
Who all of his fans did enamor
With his writings on words,
Both the known and obscure,
And for more of his posts they did clamor.
The captain of flight one oh two
Announced to the cabin and crew
It’s a little bit risky
To fly and drink whiskey
And honey but I’m down with the flu
Paul, that’s great. Change the last line to “And honey, but I’ve got the flu”, and it’ll scan perfectly.
Thank God for the Serial Comma
For without it we’d have so much drama.
It provides quite the twist:
“I see on the guest list
Are my exes, your wife and your momma.”
There was a poor student whose vice
Was to join phrases not once but twice
With wrong punctuation.
My evaluation:
The dreaded double comma splice!
I confess I’m confused by descriptors
whose patterns convey no predictors.
If bad kids are impish,
why aren’t good ones wimpish?
Our grammar requires encrypters.
Hey, it’s only 7pm on Sept. 23. Why does my entry say it’s a day late?
Bobby: ‘I’m not sure why mine didn’t post in limerick lines’ I don’t know either, but I rearranged it in limerick form. No other edits were made.
MikeG: Titles are fine, but they don’t (or rather didn’t) bear upon the judging.
Jess: #spelling #fail duly corrected.
J.C.: Your entry arrived in Ireland at midnight, hence the “September 24” date. But I included it, of course.
Thanks to Stan and Stack Exchange for the contest. And what a great idea for a contest it was! So much fun to read the entries.
I believe that prizewinning decorum
Enjoins, above all, not to bore ’em.
So, I’ll say that I’m flattered
And leave it at that or
They’ll show me the door of the forum.
Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to Stack Exchange for inspiring this flood of linguistic goodness!
Well done to the winners!
[…] with our sites, running contests, doing giveaways, hosting events, […]
[…] must be new and original and not published anywhere else, on paper or the Internet. (Don’t copy any of these, for […]
I realize one thing – punctuation
Is never a clear situation.
As an editor,
You shouldn’t err,
But commas are such frustration!
I’m studying trying to make sentences on limericks about love or friend can anypone help
Sbosh: You could try writing down some key words that rhyme, and take it from there.
Two limericks about Pauline Hansen won lst Prize in an OZWORDS
competition some years ago. How can I locate them?
Yasmine Gooneratne
ygooneratne2@gmail.com
I suggest contacting Ozwords. They should have records of this competition.
Dear Dr Carey,
I had thought I WAS contacting OZWORDS when I made my request for information re an earlier limerick competition that was directed, I remember, by the late Frederick Ludowyk. Would you be kind enough to send me an email address on which I can contact the present Editor? My apologies for troubling you.
Thank you very much.
Yasmine Gooneratne
I don’t know the present editor’s email address, and I have no affiliation with Ozwords. But their contact details are here:
https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/centres/andc/contact-us
One of the winning limericks ended with the phrase “Please explain”.