^ "LIMERICK | meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary".The name is generally taken to be a reference to the City or County of Limerick in Ireland sometimes particularly to the Maigue Poets, and may derive from an earlier form of nonsense verse parlour game that traditionally included a refrain that included "Will you come (up) to Limerick?" Īlthough the New English Dictionary records the first usage of the word limerick for this type of poem in England in 1898 and in the United States in 1902, in recent years several earlier examples have been documented, the earliest being an 1880 reference, in a Saint John, New Brunswick newspaper, to an apparently well-known tune, The origin of the name limerick for this type of poem is debated. There is at least one unstressed syllable between the stresses but there may be more – as long as there are not so many as to make it impossible to keep the equal spacing of the stresses. The number and placement of the unstressed syllables is rather flexible. It is this: Lines one, two, and five have three feet, that is to say three stressed syllables, while lines three and four have two stressed syllables. Verses in limerick form are sometimes combined with a refrain to form a limerick song, a traditional humorous drinking song often with obscene verses.ĭavid Abercrombie, a phonetician, takes a different view of the limerick. Many limericks show some form of internal rhyme, alliteration or assonance, or some element of word play. The most prized limericks incorporate a kind of twist, which may be revealed in the final line or lie in the way the rhymes are often intentionally tortured, or both. Exploitation of geographical names, especially exotic ones, is also common, and has been seen as invoking memories of geography lessons in order to subvert the decorum taught in the schoolroom. Within the genre, ordinary speech stress is often distorted in the first line, and may be regarded as a feature of the form: "There was a young man from the coast" "There once was a girl from De troit." Legman takes this as a convention whereby prosody is violated simultaneously with propriety. In early limericks, the last line was often essentially a repeat of the first line, although this is no longer customary. The first line traditionally introduces a person and a place, with the place appearing at the end of the first line and establishing the rhyme scheme for the second and fifth lines. The first, second and fifth are usually either anapaests or amphibrachs. The third and fourth lines are usually anapaestic, or one iamb followed by one anapaest. The standard form of a limerick is a stanza of five lines, with the first, second and fifth rhyming with one another and having three feet of three syllables each and the shorter third and fourth lines also rhyming with each other, but having only two feet of three syllables. A limerick displayed on a plaque in the city of Limerick, Ireland Form An illustration of the fable of Hercules and the Wagoner by Walter Crane in the limerick collection "Baby's Own Aesop" (1887) The following example is a limerick of unknown origin:Īnd the clean ones so seldom are comical. Its humour is not in the "punch line" ending but rather in the tension between meaning and its lack. Legman dismissed the "clean" limerick as a "periodic fad and object of magazine contests, rarely rising above mediocrity". Women are figuring in limericks almost exclusively as "villains or victims". According to Gershon Legman, who compiled the largest and most scholarly anthology, this folk form is always obscene and the exchange of limericks is almost exclusive to comparatively well-educated males. From a folkloric point of view, the form is essentially transgressive violation of taboo is part of its function. It was popularized by Edward Lear in the 19th century, although he did not use the term. It is written in five-line, predominantly anapestic trimeter with a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA, in which the first, second and fifth line rhyme, while the third and fourth lines are shorter and share a different rhyme. In combination with a refrain, it forms a limerick song, a traditional humorous drinking song often with obscene verses. For the vaccine, see LYMErix.Ī limerick ( / ˈ l ɪ m ər ɪ k/ LIM-ər-ik) is a form of verse that appeared in England in the early years of the 18th century.
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