A shocking young punster from Enfield

[j4]

At some point during the mildly-hungover post-fryup party-recovery session on Sunday morning, a new game was invented (or perhaps I should say perpetrated) by hairyears and aardvark179 (I can't remember precisely where to lay the blame, which is probably for the best), ably aided and abetted by covertmusic, fivemack, taimatsu, addedentry and me. What is this new jeu du jour?

Oxbridge limericks.

It's not an aimless or endless meme: unusually, it's a meme with a publishable goal. The aim is to come up with limericks for each of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Most of the examples so far have been scurrilous in the extreme; I offer this most recent contribution phoned in (well, txted in) by hairyears as an exemplar:

The delicate dons of St Hilda's
Were shocked by the bill from the builda's
They charged for the water,
The bricks and the mortar,
And labour, replacing the dilda's.

The only rule over and above those dictated by the form is that the limerick must use the name of the college as the primary rhyme (commonly used shortened forms are acceptable, e.g. "Catz" for St Catherine's).

The ultimate aim is to create two full sets of limericks for each university's colleges: one 'clean' (if you could tell it to your mum -- no, not Your Mum -- then it's probably fine) and one, er, not (see e.g. above). We'll collect the best ones (all entries will be subjected to rigorous peer-review through the media of LJ polls and shouting) and hopefully put them together into something on paper that people can keep (think of this as the Viz to Pocketful of Lies' LRB).

For the time being, just post your limericks as comments here or in your own journal with the tag 'oxbridgelimericks'; in time I may be able to find a better home for them, but I don't want to delay the fun because of boring information management issues. Examples have already been sighted in the wild; it's possible that we may be seeing the start of a limerick pandemic (popularly known as 'rhyme flu').

Go forth and versify!

Comments

[htfb.livejournal.com]

Three of these are in the New Oxford Book of Light Verse, ed. Kingsley Amis:

There was a young Fellow of Wadham
Who asked for a ticket to Sodom.
When they said "We prefer
Not to issue them, sir,"
He said "Don't call me sir, call me modom."

And two Cambridge ones:

There was a young Fellow of Caius
Who sat with a girl on his knees.
He said to her, "Miss---
Take more trouble with this,
And pay less attention to these."

There was a young Fellow of King's
Who cared not for whores and such things:
His height of desire
Was a boy in the choir
With a bum like a jelly on springs.

And unaccountably not collected by Amis, my favourite limerick of all:

There was a young man of St John's
Who attempted to bugger the swans:
But the loyal head porter
Said "Sir, take my daughter.
The Swans is reserved for the Dons."

[j4.livejournal.com]

Excellent! :-)

Though surely, "... sat with a girl on his knaius" etc.? (Not an Oxbridge limerick but I have always liked this one: "A girl who weighed many an oz. / Used language I dare not pronoz. / When a fellow unkind / Pulled her chair from behind / Just to see (so he said) if she'd boz.")

By the way, you're not obliged to write limericks about your alma mater, but if one were, you'd at least be blessed with a productive rhyme (whereas Pembroke is as deficient in limericabilitudinity as in most other things).