Limericks Up & About . . .

      A limerick it’s an English humorous verse form consisting of five anapaestic lines rhyming aabba, the third and fourth lines, having two stresses and the other’s three.

Early examples, notably those of Edward Lear in his Book of Nonsense (1846), use the same rhyming word at the end of the first and last lines, but most modern limericks avoid such repetition. The limerick is almost always a self-contained, humorous poem, and usually plays on rhymes involving the names of people or places.

      First found in the 1820s, it was popularized by Lear, and soon became a favorite form for the witty obscenities of anonymous versifiers.

      The following is one of the less offensive examples of the coarse limerick tradition:

There was a young fellow named Menzies

Whose kissing sent girls into frenzies;
But a virgin one night
Crossed her legs in a fright
And fractured his bifocal lenses.