Limerick (poetry)

From a folkloric point of view, the form is essentially transgressive; violation of taboo is part of its function.

According to Gershon Legman, who compiled the largest and most scholarly anthology, this folk form is always obscene[6] and the exchange of limericks is almost exclusive to comparatively well-educated men.

Legman dismissed the "clean" limerick as a "periodic fad and object of magazine contests, rarely rising above mediocrity".

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 Detroit..." Legman takes this as a convention whereby prosody is violated simultaneously with propriety.

[10] 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.

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.

Many limericks show some form of internal rhyme, alliteration or assonance, or some element of word play.

The name is generally taken to be a reference to the City or County of Limerick in Ireland[12][13] 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 [or won't] you come (up) to Limerick?

"[14] Although 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,[15] There was a young rustic named Mallory, who drew but a very small salary.

[22] The British wordplay and recreational mathematics expert Leigh Mercer (1893–1977) devised the following mathematical limerick: ⁠12 + 144 + 20 + 3√4/7⁠ + (5 × 11) = 92 + 0 This is read as follows: A dozen, a gross, and a score Plus three times the square root of four Divided by seven Plus five times eleven Is nine squared and not a bit more.