I wrote these for the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form, a magnificent, ambitious, and slightly insane attempt to write a limerick for every word in the English language, one letter group at a time. You can see my additions and revisions there, but I like to keep them here as well; the menu below leads to permanent pages for each letter group. You can also see some miscellaneous and co-written pieces, an area especially aimed at OEDILFers, a page for mature readers, and pages of limericks about fine artists, Australian rock bands and history and politics, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. One of these limericks, and a video of me reading it, featured in an AP article about the OEDILF at the end of 2017, and briefly on the Washington Post and New York Times sites. Two featured in The RSPB Anthology of Wildlife Poetry, edited by Celia Warren (A&C Black, 2011).
For things from this landlocked and tropical
Country, to use Ethiopical,
Not Ethiopian,
Sounds pretty dopey, ’n’
Not, as you’d hoped, very topical.
Californians, when fishin’ for trout,
Often go for a golet: no doubt
That this char, Dolly Varden,
When feedin’, goes hard, ’n’
Its golet, by golly, gets stout.
Golet, a Middle English form of gullet, later came to be used for Salvelinus malma, more commonly known as the Dolly Varden trout (although technically it’s a char).
Patrolling the cold Southern Ocean,
This petrel is ever in motion.
When irked by attacks,
He sprays esters of wax
From his beak: it’s his pique-oily potion.
The Antarctic petrel is a dark brown and white seabird of the same order as albatrosses, the Procellariiformes. These petrels, in common with almost all Procellariiforms but no other birds, produce a stomach oil consisting of wax esters and triglycerides, which they can use as a food source for chicks (or for themselves on long flights) or as a defence against predators.
A homeworker, working from home,
Is above it all—seldom will roam
From his study or couch.
It’s discouraging (ouch!)
When your loafers get scuffed by the loam.
If it’s bland and mundane food you’ve got, sauce
Can make all the difference—but not sauce
That’s creamy or white:
Set your tastebuds alight
With a generous helping of hot sauce.
Our captain was staunch: he said zip
When we started to sink. The man’s lip
Barely quivered. While we
All endeavoured to flee,
He went honourably down with the ship.
There once was a time when TV
Was all analogue, children. You see,
This new digital stuff
Wasn’t heard of. Enough
Of your questions! It’s nap-time for me.
Thanks, Grandpa. You mean digital television isn’t just... television? So was analogue TV, like, hand-painted? Or steam-powered? Were you watching it the day the Hindenburg went down?
This gritstone’s like sandstone, but grittier.
I wish I could say something wittier,
But grit isn’t great,
So regard yourself, mate,
As lucky this verse isn’t shittier.
A beef cap, or beef or ox bung,
Is a cleaned-out intestine. Among
The bung’s uses: salami
And haggis. (That’s barmy!
Who’s eating what once harboured dung?)
The beef bung is part of a cow’s large intestine—the caecum or blind gut where bacteria break down cellulose—which can be used as a casing for haggis, mortadella, or sometimes salami. It’s like a big meaty sock. Other sections of beef intestines are called beef round casings or beef runners (small intestines) or beef middles or beef middle casings (large intestines).
Is it hog? Nae, it’s hogget. Aye, haggis
Is sheep offal: what’s in the bag is
Its guts, and the tummy
Itself’s (och, so yummy!)
Outwith. Aye, it’s true, pal. Nae gag, is.
Scots say outwith where other English-speakers would say outside. Haggis is traditionally made by packing minced offal into a sheep’s stomach, with oatmeal and spices rounding out the recipe. An ox or beef bung (from a cow’s intestine) is nowadays often used for the casing, and variations can include beef trimmings... or even pork, if ye must.
Said Werner, adventurous tourist,
“I adore Scottish food! Ja, ze surest
Vay of volfing down haggis,
Zis mince in a bag, is
Vith visky!” The man was a purist.
A burger’s a versatile dish
You can make from whatever you wish,
Such as beef, or, say... cheese?
I’m confused. So, then, these
So-called “fish burgers”: beef, with a fish?
We all know that beefburgers are made of beef, same as hamburgers, and that cheeseburgers are hamburgers made of beef with a slice of cheese on top. Therefore, a fish burger is a burger made of beef with a fish on top. No?
No. Fish burgers are patties made from fish (and potatoes and other fishy ingredients) served in a bun like a hamburger. In a similar way, tofu burgers are made from tofu, lentil burgers are made from lentils, and bean burgers are made from beans (or at least I know they were, but what are they now?). Mushroom burgers, however, are made either from mushrooms or of a single large mushroom masquerading as a burger patty.
Chicken burgers can also contain either a processed chicken patty or a slice of chicken, while a steak burger might contain an actual steak. Clearly, fish are being shortchanged here, and the world needs a fish burger containing a whole grilled mackerel or trout with its head and tail sticking out of either side.
IM GRUMPY, AN LIV IN UR CEILIN;
DISDAIN UR DISPLAY OV ILL FEELIN;
HAS CHEEZBURGER, CAN.
DO U NAO UNDERSTAN
Y CAT MACROS R RLY APPEALIN?
Cat macros, also known as lolcats, are a feline version of the online meme format known as image macros: images with humorous text superimposed on them, often in white sans-serif all-caps text. An early image macro, the O RLY? owl from 2005, displayed the ungrammatical and amusingly misspelled lolspeak associated with the form. One prominent example, I Can Has Cheezburger?, went viral in 2007 and broke into the mainstream. Other well-known cat macros have featured Grumpy Cat, Ceiling Cat, and Smudge, a bemused-looking white cat seated at a dinner table, whose image was later juxtaposed with a screenshot of a furious finger-pointing woman.
Find a job? Sell their house? If they’re needy,
The dreamers, the chancers, the greedy,
They’ve all figured “Nope, ’ll
Go lookin’ for opal
Instead” if they’re here: Coober Pedy.
Coober Pedy (PEE-dee) is a small town in outback South Australia known for its unusual lifestyle: over half of its residents live underground in homes carved out of the soft rock (known as dugouts), which stay comfortable in the desert heat. When digging out their homes, they’re also effectively doing their day job, as the town is one big opal mine. Prospecting in this way in Australia is called fossicking, which in Coober Pedy implies small-scale opal mining.
“So, a black wattle? What, is it green?”
“Well, how early a green do you mean?”
When it comes to a wattle,
In Oz, not a lot’ll
Have got all the wattles they’ve seen.
There are over 1200 different Acacia or wattle species in Australia; the golden wattle is the country’s floral emblem. Two whose names are easily confused are Acacia decurrens, commonly known as black wattle or early green wattle, native to eastern New South Wales and the ACT, and Acacia mearnsii, commonly known as black wattle, late black wattle or green wattle, which is endemic to south-eastern Australia, overlapping most of the range of the other.
“If it’s black, then this wattle is late.”
“But it’s green, and it’s early.” “Then, mate,
What you’ve got is decurrens.
A common occurens,
Confusing with mearnsii.” “Great.”
I bet that non-linguists left squirmin'
By names like Tibetic and Burman
At best are okayish
With this—Himalayish
Sounds hazy. Here endeth the sermon.
If these adjectives sound vague and above you, that's because they're old variants of Tibetan, Burmese and Himalayan that have been preserved in the names of language groups and subgroups. The Himalayish languages are a subgroup of Tibeto-Burman, a language group within the Sino-Tibetan family.
Sure, Chrome, for one, also allows a
Web user to surf, but my browser
Has such a cute logo!
No page is a no-go
For Firefox. Burn, baby! Yowza!
Mozilla Firefox, a cross-platform open-source web browser, was launched in 2004 as a successor to Netscape Navigator and competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Its usage share peaked in 2009; it’s since been overtaken by Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari, and Microsoft Edge.
In its development phase the browser was named Phoenix, but it was renamed Firebird after a trademark claim, and Firefox after another open-source project called Firebird complained. Its logo has always clearly shown a fox, but some claim that the name comes from a nickname for the red panda, although the term had next to no usage before the 21st century. According to one Mozilla moderator, the organisation “used to have a Firefox Live page where you could watch a few red pandas on camera”, which may have fuelled the confusion. It’s possible, of course, that the neologism may in the longer term become more firmly attached to the pandas, but as the popularity of the browser itself declines that seems increasingly unlikely.
Etymologists elsewhere might pander
To fans of the bear—take a gander
At this, though: this beast
Was called panda at least
Fifty years before! “Lesser”? That’s slander!
The red panda (or lesser panda, bear-cat or cat-bear) was the original panda, named as such in the 1830s. The giant panda wasn’t known to the West until the 1860s or called a panda until the 1880s, and apart from its patchy coloration, Asian origins and adorableness has little in common with its namesake.
Red pandas are relatives of raccoons, weasels and skunks native to China and the Himalayas. In a cuteness grudge match between them and their black-and-white rivals, you’d be hard-pressed to pick a winner.
Giant pandas (U.S.: panda bear)
Are shy and retiring. Don’t stare
As this black-and-white beast
Gets his freak on—at least
He’s still trying. Stand back! Give him air!
The bamboo-munching giant panda from the remote mountains of China wasn’t known to the West until 1869, and wasn’t called a panda until fifty years after the originals. The first giant pandas reached Western zoos in the 1930s, and the animals have remained popular ever since.
Despite their size and appearance, for many years giant pandas were thought to be closely related to red pandas, but genetic analysis in the 1980s showed that they are true bears of the family Ursidae. They’re notoriously difficult to breed in captivity.
Wanna know about Ditko? Don’t ask.
He saw work as a secretive task,
Like that neighborhood guy
Who slings webs—doesn’t fly—
In a red and blue suit and full mask.
Steve Ditko (1927–2018), the co-creator (with Stan Lee) of Spider-Man and creator of Doctor Strange, was notoriously reluctant to give interviews, earning a reputation as the J.D. Salinger of the comics world. He spoke little about his work even with his own family. After falling out with Lee, Ditko went on to work for Charlton Comics, DC, and underground publishers, revamping the character of the Blue Beetle and developing others of his own, such as the Question and the Ayn Rand-influenced Mr. A. He co-created one of his last original characters, Squirrel Girl, for Marvel in the early 1990s.
Blue Beetle’s completely a mess—
His story’s not neat, I’ll confess.
First he’s super, then not;
Now the latest one’s got
Scarab armour (it’s alien, yes).
The Blue Beetle, with or without the The, has been around for longer than Captain America. The original Fox Comics character from 1939, Dan Garret, gained his superpowers from Vitamin 2X (sadly, not available in stores). In the 1960s, Charlton Comics revived the character as Dan Garrett, an archaeologist whose powers came from an Egyptian scarab. Garrett was succeeded by his student Ted Kord, an athletic genius who lacked superpowers, relying instead on inventions such as his bug-shaped personal aircraft. Kord’s Blue Beetle, by now published by DC Comics, was succeeded in the 2000s by teenager Jaime Reyes. Reyes essentially gets hijacked by an alien A.I. hive mind when the scarab (yes, that one) fuses to his spine in his sleep, although he does get superpowers and armour—blue, natch—out of the deal. The Reyes version of Blue Beetle featured in the 2023 movie of the same name.
Is my cat catatonic? Seems that
Is the case. Catching Z’s on the mat
Was the catalyst. Later,
I’ll wake him. I cater,
Categorically, Cat, to that cat.
Showing a marked lack of movement or expression is at least 75% of the feline lifestyle.
