Defining Features
It’s important to remind ourselves that we at the OEDILF aren’t writing an authoritative replacement for the Oxford English Dictionary, we’re writing a huge collection of limericks that take as their theme the individual words of the English language and seeing how close we can get to defining each one. Sometimes we get very close; in many cases we can’t hope to get as close as a standard dictionary definition can. We have about two dozen words to play with per limerick, fitting into the constraints of the form, which isn’t enough to define the more technical terms, no matter what we do.
We try not to approve pieces that are little more than a use of the word without any definition whatsoever, but they sometimes get through. My personal test is that if the definition isn’t explicit, can I infer the meaning of the word from the piece? If I’m unfamiliar with the word and have to look up, was I in the right ballpark with my initial guess, or way off? If I know the word, I try to imagine myself into a state of not-knowingness.
I’ve learnt quite a few words at the OEDILF over the years that I would otherwise never have known. If an OEDILF limerick doesn’t give me any sense of what an unfamiliar word means, I start looking for ways it could—and if that has to be adding an Author’s Note, so be it. I’ll allow more leeway with familiar words, but also try to put myself in the shoes of other readers—we all have different vocabularies, after all.
Including the Word
Including the defined word in the piece itself has never been a rule at the OEDILF; there are plenty of approved pieces that don’t. It’s just the obvious thing to do in most cases, and most of us enjoy the challenge of fitting difficult words into anapest. But there will be times when the alternative of leaving out the word yields a better definition and a better limerick. Sometimes it’s a refreshing change to read a concise and funny definition that doesn’t use the arcane polysyllabic non-anapest word in question rather than plough through the split words and forced rhymes that might otherwise have resulted. I would far rather leave the word out than mis-stress it or force a “hiccup” into it, unless there was a particularly amusing reason for the mis-stress or hiccup.
Take, for example, my piece on atom smasher. Smash made me think of the Hulk, which painted a nice mental picture, but I couldn’t imagine him saying smasher; by having him say “Atom SMASH!” I was able to allude to the word, and to describe it in the rest of the piece in an apt way, without jumping through hoops of contorted expression to get there.
Or take my piece on aversion therapy, which would in no conceivable way have been improved by the inclusion of the defined word in the piece; on the contrary, it would have been seriously weakened. The effect comes from not knowing how the defined word comes into it until after the last word is spoken, so leaving it out had nothing to do with anapest or rhymes: it was because the piece was funnier that way.
There are perfectly legitimate cases where shoehorning the actual word into a line would destroy the elegant structure you’ve created and leave you with a bland verse where you once had a zingy one. Our limericks are meant to be love letters to individual words; you don’t have to keep mentioning someone’s name when you write them a love letter.
If we’re writing a piece on every word, logic might dictate including every variant of every word—aim, aiming, aimed—and yet we’ve settled on using the word root alone as the defined word, meaning that not every variant has to be covered; quite possibly they never will be.
None of which is to say that a piece that manages to include antidisestablishmentarianism won’t be impressive. But if someone else comes up with a limerick that doesn’t use it but defines it perfectly, what’s wrong with that? No one piece is going to be the be-all and end-all on a particular word.
Some people would add an Author’s Note in this sort of situation just so the defined word appears somewhere, but it already appears in the defined words list and as the title of the limerick. Such metadata can and should be taken into account when considering the total effect of the limerick.
Twin Words
In rare cases, a limerick defines two or more unrelated or loosely related words. Twin defined words are harder to pull off than single ones, because you only have the same limited number of syllables to define them either way. In such cases, we need to avoid circular definitions which make it impossible to tell what the words mean:
cat: see feline
feline: see cat
Having two defined words only works if the limerick does something like this:
cat: see feline
feline: a four-legged mammal that purrs and eats mice
or this:
cat: a four-legged mammal that purrs and eats mice
dog: a four-legged mammal that wags its tail and chases cats
The best way to test multiple defined words is to look at each in isolation and ask yourself whether the limerick would make a good definition of that word alone.
Limericks with multiple defined words too easily end up like those gadgets that do a dozen things and end up sitting unused in your cupboard. Better to have a simple knife that cuts straight to the point.
Who’s On First?
When the OEDILF began, there was a convention that no-one should write on a word that had already been limericked, out of a general sense that once a word was “taken” from the Word List it was owned by the person who got there first. That went out the window with the influx of entries from our first Washington Post Style Invitational competition, and then got run over by a passing truck when NPR listeners arrived after an interview with our Editor-in-Chief and started looking in the cupboard for words and found there none. Taking in the entries from the Style Invitational competitions, which were necessarily written without reference to what others were doing, meant that we already had many words with multiple limericks on the same definition. And the bigger problem was that it just wasn’t fun to keep finding that someone else had written a limerick on your favourite word, often pipping you to the post by hours or days. The fun is supposed to be in the writing, not the racing.
By relaxing that requirement we’ve ended up with even more great limericks. Those who come late to a word might have fewer options open to them, once the obvious rhymes and themes have been addressed by others, but that can lead to even greater heights of creativity. That said, if you’re coming to a word that’s already been covered you’ll want to consider how oversubscribed they are. If there are only one or two entries on a word, by all means add a second or third, especially if you’re covering a different meaning. If there are dozens, it pays to make sure you’re not repeating someone else’s joke or rhyme scheme (although tackling aardvark has become something of an OEDILF rite of passage). Whenever I write on a word I check to see what others have done first, to make sure I’m bringing something new to it.
I have to admit that even when I know that nothing prevents me from writing a new limerick on any word I like, my heart sinks a little every time I see that somebody else has already done it. But at least I know that if my take is different and original enough, there’s nothing to stop me from going ahead anyway, even if it’s the same sense of the same word. I can be confident that the OEDILF is (a tiny bit) better for having both than it would have been had I kept mine in my mental bottom drawer.
A Current Affair
It’s certainly possible to define words using current events as subjects, but it requires a focus first and foremost on the words being defined, rather than on the events themselves.
The OEDILF has always included limericks that have merits that outweigh their definitional weakness, although they almost always end up with a definition in an Author’s Note to compensate. Part of the problem with news-based limericks is that the compensating merit they offer is often a dig at a politician, and not always in the form of a joke. Add these up and they sound angry more than anything else, and not many of us come to the OEDILF to get our daily dose of anger.
The other part of the problem is that news-based limericks end up with long Author’s Notes to explain all the details that will inevitably be forgotten within three weeks. Long notes take longer to workshop, and having too many of them drives editors away, as I’ve discussed elsewhere. It’s an inherent problem with limericking complex current events.
Who could blame editors for not wanting to workshop limericks with so-so definition, an angry tone, and long Author’s Notes needing close copy-editing, when they could be workshopping ones with short or no notes, stronger definitions, and a joke or some wordplay to lift their mood? What do we think readers are looking for when they approach a site billed as The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form? Why should that change when they start to write them and workshop them? All it takes is a small tendency among our editors to prefer the lighthearted limerick over the heavy political limerick, added up over thousands of spur-of-the-moment decisions about which limericks to workshop, and eventually the writer of the latter will feel ignored and put upon. Small effects add up.
We come to the OEDILF to write and workshop funny little five-line verses about English words. If the verses don’t give us the lightheartedness or the words, what’s left?
Paired Limericks
It’s entirely possible to write good limericks that aren’t good candidates for the OEDILF. When I find I’ve done that, I sometimes take a paired approach, writing another limerick that does define the word and including my non-definitional one in its Author’s Note. I could even live with someone having a non-definitional one as the main limerick and a definitional one in the note.
For example, I wrote a piece on cuscus which was wordplay purely for the fun of it, but which didn’t really offer any definition. I couldn’t bring myself to submit it without any definition at all, and putting all the definition in a prose note wouldn’t have satisfied me, so I wrote another definitional piece and submitted that, initially with the aim of including the other in its note. But the Author’s Note got a bit busy for other reasons, so I left the first piece out. I posted it on my blog and mentioned the link in the workshop, but that was it.
I’m not sure how strictly I would want to hold others to such standards. Although I sometimes take the paired approach, there’s a difference between choosing to do something and being forced to. Although I’m no longer satisfied (if I ever was) with submitting less-than-definitional limericks, I’ve found plenty of enjoyment in reading them from others, and getting too hung up on insisting on definition in every one of those cases would have diminished that enjoyment considerably.
Entertain Me
If the OEDILF isn’t entertaining it may never amount to much, whether or not it’s a decent work of reference, for the reason that there are more comprehensive and much more famous reference works out there. If our project was simply to write a new OED, would we be involved? I doubt it, because there already is one.
Our most important audience is ourselves. If the work isn’t entertaining, what hope have we got of retaining the good people who are part of our project? If we become focused on definitional comprehensiveness at the expense of entertainment at the level of each and every individual limerick, I fear we would lose a lot of contributors, readers, and ultimately the whole shebang. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be accurate: we should absolutely correct errors if we find them, add notes to counter misleading impressions about what a defined word means, and so on. But if our writers get the impression that each limerick has to be not only entertaining, but also a comprehensive definition, they’ll think, “Well, that’s obviously impossible, so I won’t bother.”
As a writer, I’ll sometimes refuse an Author’s Note altogether if I think it will be at the expense of the joke. Without the joke, the limerick, to my eyes, becomes pointless. You might as well throw the whole thing out. (Obviously, I’m referring here to those pieces whose entertainment value depends on a joke. Not all of them do, and they’re the ones where I’m less fussed about whether or not there’s an Author’s Note.)
The OEDILF is an entertaining reference work. If you take out the “entertaining”, it’s fighting an uphill battle in a crowded field of reference works. If you take out the “reference”, well, at least it’s entertaining, although it’s still competing with a large field. When you combine both, though, it’s practically unique. We can retain that overall uniqueness even if some of our limericks are more definitional than entertaining and others are vice versa, as long as the general mass in the middle are both.
I’m all for encouraging people to squeeze in some definition where they can, where it doesn’t hurt the limerick, but making explicit the threat of non-approval in such cases would be a serious downer. I appreciate being able to deviate occasionally from my own definitional standards if I think there’s good reason, knowing full well that I’ll have to convince five fellow OEDILFers to get it approved, but knowing also that there are no formal rules preventing the occasional deviation.
The combination of limericks and definition was what got us participating at the OEDILF in the first place. Achieving both at once is everyone’s aim, if we include usage examples that illustrate meaning alongside the strict “X means Y” variety. But sometimes we fall short, and our usage examples, or our limericks about different pronunciations or spellings, don’t really illustrate meaning, even though we’re all agreed on the ideal. Yet they may have other attractive features that make them worthy OEDILF limericks. They may still be the “love letter to a word” that our Editor-in-Chief once held up as our goal, even if Cupid’s aim wasn’t true. Should we tear up some of those love letters and risk breaking their authors’ hearts? Or insist that every love letter has a note attached to confirm that it is a True and Complete Statement of our love for the word, and break them that way?
It has always been true that limericks that provide clear definitions of their defined words with good rhymes, rhythm and metre unquestionably have a place at the OEDILF, even if they’re otherwise downright dull. We would never banish a definitional limerick solely on the grounds that it lacked humour or zing. Conversely, we’ve always had room for the occasional oddball love-letter, because they make us laugh or think or look at a word anew. Even if they don’t strictly tell us anything we didn’t already know about what the word means, they expand the word’s meaning to us.
Reworked from forum and workshopping comments from December 2004—September 2009.
