In the End

I started gathering my old comments together to create the Encyclospeedia in early 2007, just before the birth of my son, as I knew I would have less time to comment on workshops and forum threads at the OEDILF for a while. I managed to complete five pages, all well-received, before life got in the way. For fifteen years that was as far as I’d got. Now, at last, I’ve done justice to the rest.

Towards the end of this second, much larger instalment, I was editing comments from the past decade, when my participation has been up and down, and when some of our discussions have seemed more difficult. But perhaps that’s the rose-tinted lenses of hindsight; the early years of the site could be difficult too, as other pages here have reminded me. Difficult, but ultimately rewarding: I once said to a fellow OEDILFer that I suspected my work for it would last longer than anything else I’d ever written. With the OEDILF still being with us after eighteen years, that still seems entirely possible. Our numbers and enthusiasm may flag at times, but the latter, at least, can pick up again, and so might the former.

I found one last comment that didn’t quite fit elsewhere, from just before the pandemic shut down my participation for two years—temporarily, as it turned out. It seems a good note to end on...

Memento Mori

The concept from literary criticism of the death of the author holds that “an author’s intentions and biographical facts ... should hold no special weight in determining an interpretation of their writing”. It’s as relevant to our work at the OEDILF as to the work of O. Henry, and not only because over the years some of our authors have—sadly—literally died. There are limericks which work in today’s accents and pronunciations which absolutely will not in the accents and pronunciations of the 22nd century. Although authorial intent and editorial reaction matter in the moment of a limerick’s conception, as time goes on they matter less and less; what will matter more is what future readers make of it. If it doesn’t work, or stops working... well, so what? There are plenty more fish in the sea.

Said he, anapestically.

March 2020 & November 2022.