Political Pressures

I haven’t been as active at the OEDILF in recent years as I once was, partly because of work and family priorities, partly because of general ups and downs, and partly because in 2016 the politics of the English-speaking world turned into 24/7 reality TV, leaving me with too many thousand-word blog comments on Brexit and Trump to write. Other OEDILFers dealt with this surfeit of politics by writing limericks about it, which led to some intense workshop discussions that mirrored the political polarization of the wider world.

In October 2022, not long after I’d started submitting new limericks again after two years of submitting none at all (other things got in the way in 2020 and 2021, can’t imagine what), our Editor-in-Chief responded to this charged political atmosphere with a radical proposal: to banish politics from the site. I feared this would be the end of the OEDILF; and although I hadn’t been back long, felt I had to explain why.

From 2016–2020, I posted several limericks on Brexit and UK politics, from which my own stance was fairly easy to infer. I’ve written limericks about the Ukraine war that are clearly political, because war is politics taken to its extreme. Were I to write a limerick about the merits of vaccination, some people would consider that political. Politics pervades everything.

I’ve done my share of workshopping pieces by our right-wing writers, and plenty of them have my RFA. When I was looking through old workshop notes for the Encyclospeedia I was reminded of a particularly egregious one, basically espousing birtherism when we barely knew that was a thing, which got me very worked up in the workshop... and yet the final version ended up with my RFA. We’ve seen political limericks and workshopping debates since the beginning of the site: remember who was president in 2004.

I understand the frustration of getting into endless political arguments in workshops. My solution is: don’t go into those workshops. Or leave them, if they turn political and you don’t want the grief. If writers find that nobody is workshopping them because of their rants in limerick form, they can adjust their submission rate accordingly; or they can keep posting into the void, and see where it gets them. But nothing is lost, except from a completest “every submission must be shepherded through to Approval” point of view.

Banning political limericks outright would do far more damage than would be prevented by such a ban. I understand the difficulty when workshopping becomes a source of stress; my own participation suffered around 2009–2010 because a single member (long since departed) took it upon himself to come into every one of my workshops and take issue with how I expressed myself. It wasn’t political expression in that case, just English expression. But political expression for many is how they want to express themselves—maybe not always, but sometimes. If we banned political limericks, we’d lose not just those who write them always, but also many of those who want to sometimes.

A ban on political limericks would be as much of a headache to implement as the workshop headaches that prompted it. Either we would have to exempt subjects that are inherently political, or condemn them to getting the most boring limericks imaginable. Words about specific, living politicians can’t be properly defined without reference to them; yet such words are in dictionaries, and if they don’t belong in the OEDILF, then the OEDILF is no longer Omnificent.

It would be hard to write a limerick on the Donbas without mentioning what’s been taking place there since 2014. If I’d been writing in the 1930s and 1940s, you’d better believe I’d have been ripping into Hitler, Mussolini, Mosley, Lindbergh and the rest.

More disturbing is the idea of weeding out past political work, approved or otherwise, which feels disrespectful to all of the work everyone put into those pieces over many years. If submitting, workshopping and approving these limericks turned out to have been a waste of time, what’s to say any other genre of limerick wouldn’t be next? Scientific names? Economic jargon? Limericks that are funny but not very definitional? The chilling effect of such a step on potential submissions wouldn’t just affect political limericks. The “red cars” debate ended (disappointingly, from my point of view) with the removal of OED-inspired words from the Word List, but at least there was no ban on submitting OED-based limericks, and no attempt to remove them retrospectively.

The impact of such a policy on work going forward would be significant, too. Trying to second-guess what subject we’re allowed to write about when writing our limericks would stifle our creativity enormously. We implemented the Curtained Room so that we didn’t have to tie our hands in relation to adult-themed limericks; this would feel like the opposite approach.

Implementing a curtain for political limericks would add a patchy and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy, and probably wouldn’t work anyway. Half of what people are complaining about is the arguing that goes on in workshops, which can just as easily be non-political as political. You can’t curtain any of that. But pre-emptive curtaining by kicking anything political to the kerb won’t work either. It wouldn’t just discourage certain kinds of limericks, it would discourage limerick writers.

Years ago, I argued unsuccessfully against expanding the OEDILF’s remit to include not just dictionary words but more encyclopaedic material like biographical pieces, places, titles of popular books or movies or records, and so on. Our Editor-in-Chief’s argument prevailed, and we’ve been the better for it; I’ve certainly written some fine limericks I never would have written if not for that. Banning political limericks would have the opposite effect: there would be fine limericks that I’d never write because of it.

My usual approach to submitting work with a political angle (which is only a small fraction of my work) is that it has to be about the defined word—I certainly agree about the undesirability of submitting political limericks with arbitrarily chosen defined words. I’ve sometimes chosen to write about words with a political dimension, either because they’re inherently political words that need defining, or (in the case of biographies) because of our encyclopaedic approach. If an encyclopaedia doesn’t have entries on some of the most significant political figures or moments of our time, it feels incomplete. But I personally don’t take that as a licence to write biographies of every minor passing Member of Parliament or of Congress, or limericks about minor political events that in a newspaper would be tomorrow’s forgotten fish-and-chips wrapper.

If my point of view can be inferred from the limerick or an AN, I don’t see that as terrible, as long as it’s clearly my point of view and not being stated as an objective fact. Really, the guiding principle I try to follow—which isn’t limited to political limericks—is “don’t pick unnecessary fights”.

Reworked from comments written for an OEDILF Forum thread in October 2022.