Yes, Virginia, There Are Snapdragons

A Dad-and-Daughter discussion about rhyme, limericks, and science.

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“Please tell me where limericks come from.

Of course, I already asked Mum.”

“Dear, research reflects

they’re not very complex

but they’re far more than parts of their sum.”

“So, let’s start online: Mentalfloss

has an article I’ve come across.

Twenty-three words sans rhyme

which, in fact, rhyme sometime

proves you often must floss away dross.”

“Let’s take ‘gulf’—that’s a difficult rhyme,

though a common word heard all the time.

It rhymes both with sulf

and the fluff we call culf

which is what pillows puff when they mime.”

“Sulf is the word that I’ll choose

for the limerick that I’ll write and use

to explain where they’re from

because antirrhinum

is a toadflax, a plant that we’ll muse.”

“Toadflax and sulf are the same,

like a rose which has more than one name.

Snapdragons belong

to the toadflax/sulf throng

(common scents says they’re not of rose fame).”

“But sulf doesn’t always belong

in the fields where their roots have grown strong,

and that’s where they’re weeds

so we try to stop seeds

that they spread, though bees buzz their own song.”

“To interweave all that we’ve learned

about snapdragons (weeds where they’re spurned!),

we’ll wrap this up tightly

with prose which will rightly

confirm that their limerick’s well-earned:”

“Prosaically speaking, on the website Mentalfloss we’ll find ‘23 Notoriously Unrhymable Words (That Actually Have Rhymes).’ These include ‘gulf’ which rhymes with ‘culf,’ an old southwest English word for the loose feathers that come out of pillows and cushions, and with ‘sulf,’ which is another name for toadflax.”

“Next, Wikipedia tells us toadflax is the common name of several related genera of plants in the plantain family Plantaginaceae. This includes chaenorhinum, cymbalaria, linaria, misopates, nuttallanthus, and antirrhinum, also known as snapdragons, which are considered weeds wherever they are not native plants.”

“Now we simply concatenate this conglomeration of collected cognitive constituencies into a limerick combining the appropriate architecture with artistic artifice and adequate assonance:”

“Snapdragons are antirrhinum.

They’re toadflax—weeds where they’re not from.

Sometimes they’re called sulf,

(one of two rhymes for gulf),

so you see where this limerick comes from.”

“And that boy who cried ‘wolf’ far too often?

Crying ‘culf’ would have not helped to soften

any hearts at the time

for, as ‘wolf’ has no rhyme,

no one shed any tears on his coffin.”

By Ken Gosse

From: United States

Facebook URL: https://www.facebook.com/ken.gosse/