Word: limerick
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...Graphic closed its crossword contest, commenced awarding munificent prizes to smirking victors, began a new, a different sort of contest, which was immediately copied by the New this was to win rich rewards by writing the last lines of incomplete limericks (TIME, Feb. 23). Forthwith, letters, telegrams, telephone messages, began to rain upon the editors of the Bronx Home News. "Help us to write the last line and skin the Graphic." This is what the Public wanted the Bronx editors to do. The editors sat in consultation. One man's version of the last line of a limerick...
Next morning, the Home News published the announcement that ''a list of rhyming words is given here to aid in writing the last lines of the uncompleted limericks in yesterday's Journal and Graphic." Followed some words. The Journal limerick required a rhyme with "stroll" and "roll'; the editors of the Home News suggested "poll," "extol," "dole," "cajole," "condole," etc., carefully explaining that the first meant the head; the second, to praise in highest terms; the third, to give in small quantities; the fourth, to impose on by flattery or delusive promises; the fifth, to express sympathy, etc. The Graphic...
...editors?and, besides, the Post did not offer prizes for last lines. However, the Encyclopedia Britannica, in its 1911 edition, remarked: "In recent years, competitions of the 'missing word' type have had a considerable vogue, the competitor, for instance, having to supply the last line of the limerick...
Surely the invention of the limerick was a brilliant piece of originality. Who did it, or why he named the verseform after the country which lies just west of Tipperary, is not known. But the limerick was developed and popularized by Edward Lear 80 or 90 years ago. He was a young artist of 20 who had just published some colored plates of the rarer Psittacidae (parrots). The 13th Earl of Derby went up to London thereupon and lured Lear to go down to Knowsley to draw Derby's private menagerie. While there, he wrote some poems for the delectation...
...matter of fact, however, the limerick had not wasted away in the decades between Mr. Lear's book and the Graphic's rediscovery. Indeed, it has been a more or less regular attraction for some weeks in a contemporary though not a rival of the Graphic, published indeed in the same town?the literary supplement of The New York Evening Post. In the latter have been appearing for some weeks such gems...