Archive for the ‘victorian era’ Tag
I pride myself on having a huge and varied collection of limericks as you well know. Most of them are very old with the identity of the writers long forgotten. For the next two weeks I’ll be highlighting some of the more famous limerick writers with samples of their work. Most were well known poets, writers, and authors. Some of their limericks will be off-color and a bit sexual so I recommend that younger children be monitored. Over the next two weeks you’ll be introduced to some of histories best limerick authors. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.
The first thing I’d like to do is give you a short history lesson on limericks because they’ve been around a lot longer than you might think. The first known limericks appeared in the early 18th century and they just happened to be written in French (and they weren’t called limericks then). Around that same time the Irish Brigade was serving in France (1691 to 1780). The short poems were eventually imported to Limerick, Ireland where their current name originated. Edward Lear 1812-1888, initially wrote many rather mild limericks. It wasn’t until the Victorian Era that the citizenry seized upon the limerick as a way to vent as many four-letter words as possible, much to the delight of young schoolboys. It seems that the bawdiest limericks of that time tended to be written by the British. A few samples of Lear’s tamer limericks will be featured in my next post in two days.
Here is a sample a moderately bawdy limerick of the era:
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Said a widow whose singular vice
Was to keep her dead husband on ice,
“It’s been hard since I lost him.
I’ll never defrost him,
Cold comfort, but cheap at the price.”
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My next post will be an introduction to Edward Lear who authored many limericks over many years.
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MORE TO COME
More weirdness from the human race. There seems to be an endless supply and I’m going to eventually post all of it.
- The human eye can see only about 3000 stars on the clearest night, even though there are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone.
- One medieval theory to explain why a dunked witch would not float was that witches deliberately ate foods that make them fart. The gas would build up in their guts, making them lighter than air, so they could fly.
- In Europe in the Middle Ages it was believed that there were over 7 million demons in the air, which could be inhaled or swallowed and would cause disease or make a corpse turned into a vampire.
- Thomas Edison filed 1093 patents, including those for the lightbulb, electric railways, and the movie camera. When he died in 1931, he held 34 patents for the telephone, 141 for batteries, 150 for the telegraph, and 389 patents for electric lights and power.
- No pain, no gain – in their quest for an hour-glass figure, some of Victorian women wore their corsets so tight that they suffered broken ribs.
- During the Middle Ages, mummies became enormously popular as medicine. At first the resin-soaked bandages were thought to be health giving, but eventually the whole mummy, bones, flesh, and all, was ground up and sold to people who would eat it.
- Sleepwalking, also known as somnambulism, effects approximately 18% of the world’s population. People are capable of doing all sorts of things while in their sleep, including eating, bathing, and dressing. Some subjects have been recorded driving cars and committing murder while technically asleep.
- According to the World Toilet Organization, the average person visits the toilet about 6 to 8 times a day, or 2500 times a year, and spends three years of his or her life sitting on the toilet.
- Emetophobia is the fear of vomiting or of being around others who are vomiting. It is the fifth most common phobia according to the International Emetophobia Society.
- Diabetes can lead to high levels of sugar in the urine. Before simple test for sugar levels were made available, doctors would taste their patient’s urine to see if it was sweet.
I LOVE WEIRD SH**T
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