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Jun 19, 2007

This week's theme
Toponyms coined after places in Ireland

This week's words
donnybrook
limerick
blarney
shillelagh
carrageen

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limerick

noun: A humorous, often risque, verse of five lines with the rhyme scheme aabba.

[After Limerick, a borough in Ireland. The origin of the name of the verse is said to be from the refrain "Will you come up to Limerick?" sung after each set of extemporized verses popular at gatherings.]

"First of all, the limerick judges at this newspaper would like contestants to know that we are acutely aware that 'Journal' rhymes with 'urinal.' Almost as much fun as reading limericks was reading excuses from the people who wrote the limericks. It was as if we had caught someone reading the Sex With Aliens Weekly at the supermarket. Diane Harvey, of DeForest, for example, began her entrant thusly:

'It is with a deep sense of shame that I submit the following puerile, low-brow limericks and confess the guilty pleasure I had in writing them. As one who normally leads a completely respectable life, I cannot tell you what an illicit thrill it was to shed the trappings of responsible adulthood and for a 'brief shining moment' indulge in rude juvenile humor once again.'

There once was a parrot named 'Colonel,'
Who read all the papers diurnal.
But his favorite page
On the floor of his cage
Was the Hesselberg page from the Journal."

See more usage examples of limerick in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

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