Limericks Unleashed: My Creative Key to Brain Boosting
How Love for Limericks Ignites Mental Agility and Imagination
A limerick is a strange art
Arranged to put fun in your heart.
Its form is quite brief.
It comes in like a thief
In the night but with joy to impart.
What’s fun about a limerick
is that it’s more joyous to write than other things, such as a grocery list, a note to the milkman, or a response to this article.
“Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
My research shows that the pious St. Thomas Aquinas wrote the first limerick in the Thirteenth Century, penned in medieval Latin. In English, the oldest limerick is “Summer Is Icumen In” or “Summer Has Arrived” in 1260.
Shakespeare, Mallory, Bacon, or Lear?
Of course, the origin of the limerick has been attributed alternatively to Shakespeare (1564–1616,) Spanish soldiers linguistically roughhousing after a Thirteenth Century war, or Edward Lear in the mid-1800s.
- “There Was an Old Man of Nantucket”
- “There was an Old Man with a beard”
- “A certain young fellow named Bee-Bee”
- “There once was a fly on the wall”
— first lines of famous limericks known for scandalous or humorous endings
I like the little poems that always have the rhyme scheme of AABBA, no relation to the elating Swedish singers ABBA.
Skeletons out of the closet with mothballs
The modern Saturday Evening Post, a magazine read by my family, along with Life and Collier’s in the 40s and 50s, came out of mothballs to surprise and amuse humanity again. The limerick contest they run is always well-populated with non-perverse verses.
“Coming out of mothballs” is noteworthy because woolen garments were once stored over the summer with marble-sized naphtha moth-repellent spheres in their pockets. When you took your garments out of the closet for winter wear, it was no surprise that coats and suits retained the odor of mothballs until aired out.
She didn’t know what she was about to start with me
My mother made up a joke about this, punning with sly impunity. “How do we know that moths are sad,” she said. “Because the little moth bawls.”
I was so impressed. I made up one for her.” Mom, what car starts with P?” She replied, Plymouth and Pontiac. “No, I said, all cars start with gasoline, not pee.” Mother often washed our mouths out with soap when we frivolously transgressed her border of acceptability.
There was a soap called Lifebuoy, and I still remember its redolent taste.
I remember the taste of that soap.
As well as my first taste of dope.
But writing a poem
Although some are ho-hum
Helps keeping me sober with hope.
