limerick

王朝百科·作者佚名 2010-01-17

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五行打油诗（一种通俗幽默短诗，有五行组成，韵式为aabba）

A light humorous, nonsensical, or bawdy verse of five anapestic lines usually with the rhyme scheme aabba.

五行打油诗韵脚通常为 aabba的幽默、无聊或下流的抑抑扬格五行诗,例如：

love beautiful nice.

In the old dark night.

beam under the moon light!

Etymologies can sometimes be a bit disappointing, as, for example, when one is told that limerick is named after a city or county in Ireland without being told why it is so named. Unfortunately, we run into a difficulty here that is not uncommonly faced by etymologists, namely, that no one is precisely sure why this piece of humorous verse was so named. One theory is that it was named for a group of poets who wrote in Limerick in the 18th century; another, that it came from a custom at parties of making up a nonsense verse and following it with a chorus of “Will you come up to Limerick.” In any case, the first limericks appeared in books published in 1820 and 1821, and the form was popularized by Edward Lear in a collection published in 1846. The word itself, however, is not recorded until 1896. Let us sum up by saying: “There once was a verse form named limerick./No one can account for the name of it./Some think from a game/Or from poets it came./If you know please come up to Limerick.”

查看词源学后会经常令我们失望，这是因为，比如，当某人得知limerick 是由爱尔兰的一城市（或一个郡的）名字而来，却并不告知这样命名的原因。不幸的是，我们碰到了一个词源学家经常遇到的难题，那就是，没有一个人能确定为什么这种幽默的诗歌这样命名。一种理论认为它是源于18世纪在利默里克写作的一群诗人；还有一种看法认为它是源于一种集会上的风俗，这种风俗要求写完一毫无意义的诗后众人合唱“你将去利默里克吗”。不管怎样，1820年和1821年出版的这种五行打油诗集子广为流传，爱德华·利尔于1846年出版的集子使这种形式得到普及。但是，这个单词直到1896年才有记载。我们可以通过这么说来总结：“曾经有种诗的形式名叫利默里克。/但没有人能解释它的名字。/有人认为源于一种游戏/或源于一群诗人。/如果你知道就到利默里克来。”

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limerick is a five-line humorous poem with an AABBA rhyme scheme. It is about 500 years old, and held to have first been used as a distinct form at the end of the sixteenth century. The limerick was popularized by Edward Lear in A Book of Nonsense, which includes many limericks as well as other poems, for example "The Owl and the Pussy Cat."

Limericks are in accentual verse, which means that the satisfactory construction of a line is determined by the number of accents with little or no regard to the number of syllables. In this it differs from metered verse, which is accentual-syllabic, taking account of both the pattern of accents and the number of syllables. Because the syllables are not counted, accentual verse has a certain flexibility. Ballads and nursery rhymes are other types of accentual verse. In limericks, the accents work like this:

Line 1: 3 accents Line 2: 3 accents Line 3: 2 accents Line 4: 2 accents Line 5: 3 accents

Because of the freedom allowed by accentual verse, the first line might work like this: There was once a young man from Berlin. or it might work like this: There was a young man from Berlin. Similarly the third line might work like this: He rode on a whale or it might work like this: And he rode on a whale. No matter which variations are used, the result is verse that basically has an anapestic feel -- a pattern of strong, weak, weak.

The limerick form as practiced by Lear was often different in two respects from what we expect of limericks today. Lear frequently uses the fifth line of the limerick as little more than a paraphrase of line 1 or 2, or a combination thereof. In addition, he generally uses the same word at the end of line 5 as at the end of line 1. For example,

There was a Young Lady of Clare,

Who was sadly pursued by a bear;

When she found she was tired,

She abruptly expired,

That unfortunate Lady of Clare.

However, neither generalization is always the case. Sometimes the final line serves more as a punchline, as in most modern limericks, and ends with a different word.

There was an Old Man of Berlin,

Whose form was uncommonly thin;

Till once, by mistake,

Was mixed up in a cake,

So they baked that Old Man of Berlin.

There was an Old Lady whose folly

Induced her to sit in a holly;

Whereupon, by a thorn

Her dress being torn

She quickly became melancholy.

More modern limericks generally end with a punchline, the same way many jokes do. There has also been an expansion of the topics covered in limericks since Lear's time, and there are many bawdy limericks nowadays. Here is a limerick with a punchline:

There was a young man from Darjeeling,

Who got on a bus bound for Ealing.

It said at the door:

"Don't spit on the floor."

So he carefully spat on the ceiling.

Another development is that some people are interested in playing with the form, as in this anonymous limerick:

A decrepit old gas man named Peter,

While hunting around for the meter,

Touched a leak with his light.

He arose out of sight,

And, as anyone can see by reading this, he also destroyed the meter.

W. S. Gilbert played with the form in a different way: