h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

... that it would be inappropriate to start a new limerick from this page?

If you do it would put everypne in a rage

It might, at some point in the future, be worthwhile collating all the printable, funny or worthwhile limericks from the L-game pages into a single entry. This will, however, take one man many years and much sweat. The added problem would be that the forum for such an article would soon fill up again with suggestions, L-games and putative additions. Anyway, the main entry is up; any further work on such a subject will take time better used for introducing new subjects to the Approved guide. If anyone has the time to trawl through the existing collaborative forums it would, no doubt, be useful.

I think that you're right,
I might start a fight...

In the ring or on a stage?
=============================

When I saw this entry I wondered where the references to the L game were... Shall we play here now?
Shall we she said, or shall we not?

Aarrrrgh. No. please, keep them in the same place, the easier to collate them.
The limerick game was successful:
Collation will thus be quite stressful
Please don't write them here
As quite soon I do fear
That the forum here soon will be messful

A man from Gay Paree
Got stuck at line three

There was a young girl from Peru
Whose limericks end at line two

The was a young man from Verdun...

The current L-game is at http://www.h2g2.com/forumframe.cgi?forum=15011&thread=29876

3

Why do people always use Verdun for that one? Where exactly is it? Nice diversion work there, by the way.

I usually hear "There was a young man from Nantucket". Of course, I've just come from highschool, so all my friends were quite taken with the dirtier rhymes...

~Irving

1. In South Quebec on Montreal Island population 61,307
2. or Verdun-sur-Meuse city NE France on the Meuse ESE of Reims population 23,427

A pun on one

Shall we she said, or shall we not?
She begged that we'd not, but wot
Better place would there be
For a limerick spree
Than from the page about which they were written.



*ducks flying debris* Okay, okay, I'll GO already!

There is a lad called ged
who has a misshapen head
so he got a mallet
and started to bang it
and he now has brain damage instead.

I just thought you'd like to know that.

I heard this one on my English class, don't know where it comes from, though...

There was a young man of Japan
Who wrote verses that never would scan.
When they said, "But the thing
Doesn't go with a swing",
He replied, "Yes, but I always like to get as many words into the last line as I possibly can."

There were a few of that manner in the original edited version of the article before the PTB set to work on it. One might have been by Anonymouse and read thus:

There once was a limerick by me
which didn't rhyme at all.
It didn't have those two little lines in the middle
that are supposed to be shorter than the others
and the structure was completely wrong.
Oh, and it had one line too many as well.

Does anyone have any technical comments about the article's fact rather than more limericks? only one person came to the forum of the original article (Bruce - cheers) with literary explanation of the various verse portions used in the construction of a limerick. Can anyone find 'The doodahs of sixteen wonderful old women - exhibiting their principle eccentricities and amusements' as none of the libraries round my way had heard of it?

Uhm.. I never have either, though it sounds an interesting tale.

Btw, I don't believe I can claim rights to the aforementioned.. uhm.. limerick?

(I'll leave whether that's a GoodThing™ or BadThing™ to the opinions of the readers. )

While the technical mores of limerickry are all well and good, it has to be said, to our credit, that we did our level best to completely ignore them. However I think our invention of the hybrid-tangentially-conclusive-limerick must stand as one of the great achievements of the 20th century.

Oops, I jsut noticed that there hasn't been an entry to this place in months...hope you're still interested. There was a question about the authenticity of the facts presented in the original entry. Well, accoriding to an Edward Lear site, the book "The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women, illustrated by as many engravings: exhibiting their Principal Eccentricities and Amusements" (sorry, don't know how to underline here, yet)was published by Harris and Son, at the Corner of St. Paul's Church-Yard, in 1820. It was the first book of English "nonsense verses". The author is unknown. There is also another book "Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen" which, according to the same site, was published in 1821 and was the next book of limericks to be written by John Marshall (Harris's competition). The author was a grocer named Richard Scrafton Sharpe, and the illustrations were later recognized as the workof Robert Cruikshank. ;-P

I have "The Book of Nonsense" around hers somewhere, but I'm not sure there's an author or even a compiler in the credits...

'Nonnie
(I'll let you know if I ever find the book again.)