Whoever it was who condensed it down to six words did something masterly; the little announcement speaks not merely of the heartbreak of an infant’s death but also of harrowing poverty and human resilience. Granted, it’s traditional for limericks to exceed all standards of decency, but they ought to be at least as clever as they are offensive, and I don’t think that Asimov’s succeed.

What’s more, even in this plainspoken moment, doublespeak may have insinuated itself with a buried pun: ( Right it! I have written my own fair share of shameless limericks (see below), but I include them among a broad spectrum of topics, rather than make it the focal point of my creative energy. The humour is not in the “punch line” ending but rather in the tension between meaning and its lack. Anybody who has ever taught a poetry class has encountered the exasperated student inquiring, “ Why can’t poets just say what they mean? Until quite recently, few of these verses had ever appeared in print for public consumption, although many had been privately printed and circulated from time to time.Consider the charming, nubile Nan from Nantucket of an anonymous American limerick that first appeared in The Princeton Tiger in 1902. And of course such attempts to craft a language free of ambiguity, rendering a contract’s terms incontestable and inescapable, and hence immune to all vagaries of interpretation and intervention, are invariably doomed; even the most straightforward words, set out in the most straightforward fashion, engender mist and smoke, shadings and concealments. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

I understand you will use my personal data to improve services and send me marketing communications You must consent to the storage and use of your personal data as laid out in our privacy notice. Something about the whimsical rhyme scheme, the bouncing meter and the sense of tension created in lines 3 and 4 seem to make the limerick especially suitable for the lewd and off-color subject matter.Furthermore, he accompanies each and every limerick in the collection with a paragraph or two of commentary. These days, unlike the days of my youth, you very seldom find a men’s room stall darkly scribbled with lubricious verses. Choice of paint is a crucial decision—potentially elevating a room from the merely functional to the inviting and comely. But rather than alluding to the conjugal act with clever innuendo, these dull and dirty limericks display zero sense of subtlety.