Word: limericks
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Quite unabashed, the New York Evening Journal (Hearst) pounced upon the Limerick Contest. Before the Graphic had its new contest under way, the Journal had already begun a Limerick Contest with prizes...
This paper was not surprised yesterday when its Limerick Contest idea was pounced upon with desperate rapidity by the direct descendants of Ali Baba and his forty thieves on the New York Journal...
...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...