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

Re: One of the difficult ones... With added filth

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

"one-eyed night porter" - a euphemism to remember there.

Re: One of the difficult ones... With added filth

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I'm not fond of neologisms, but I thought of the old-style college porters with their bowler-hats and decided that the image was self-explanatory and wonderfully rude.

Now that I come to think of it, replacing the unfortunate gerbil with another rodent gives us a partial rhyme for Harris Manchester:

A fellow of Harris Manchester
Let sores on his glans penis fester
His one-eyed night porter
Got steadily shorter
And now he's a Hamster Molester

Can you suggest a way, using hyphenation, italics, or otherwise, of highlighting the emphasis in the 'chest' of Manchester so that it is pronounced in a way that rhymes with 'fester', instead of the usual flat intonation?