Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
How I wonder if you are,
Like a diamond in the sky,
Worth it to divert my eye.
*Crap! That didn’t help one jot.
Now I’ve lost my train of thought.
—Loki Sid
If you wanna learn Welsh, from the get-go
Beware [ɬ]. I should let you know
This lateral fricative
Some find prohibitive
And end up in lovely [kl]andudno.
—Saint Tudno
Ph.D. in hand
Proud, yet scared the world will learn—
I’m an impostor!
—Lauren Ipsum
Fungal infection
Toenail’s yellow and brittle
(Prof said, “Add foot notes”)
—Paul Bunion
Passive Aggressive
‘Your head hurts’ and ‘You hurt your head’:
We change round the args and the pred.
We can change them again:
‘Your head was hurt when
I punched you and left you for dead.’
—Robb R.
Addendum
So I’m sorry your head has got swollen;
If you hadn’t fought back and then fallen
The worst to occur
(And I’m sure you’ll concur)
Is that your wallet would have got stolen.
Commentary and Analysis
These limericks, rich and expressive,
Should be all on the theme of the passive.
But in that last verse
Two times there occurs
A structure encoding ingressive.
Implication
Which shows that when writing a verse
On a syntactic structure of choice
Whatever you say
The verse runs away
And degenerates into white noise.
Look it up, shmook it up!
Superscript numbers with
No footnote visible?
That’s just absurd.
Endnotes are usually
Bibliographical.5
Flipping the page? No, I’m
Flipping the bird!
—I. Biden
Adventurers, cursed by a doom of witch,
Were trapped underground in a tomb of lich.
They saw true horrors there,
For which none could prepare,
Like a subclause beginning with “whom of which”.
—Pete Bleackley
child acquisitionists study the gap in
between babbling and fluently yapping
their logical function
is infant abduction
this is linguistics? it sounds like kidnapping
—Andrew Lamont
The Body
Linguo-Modification
Cycle
I got a nose-piercing for charity.
But to all my kind donors’ hilarity
[ɛ] [ɛ̃] became
—and for all vowels the same:
It was total vocalic nasality.
—Neiz, L.
I got my tongue pierced for aesthetics
I was weak, my decision pathetic:
For no sounds could be made
With tongue body, tip, blade;
’Twas a lesson in moral phonetics.
—Lynn Gwyll
A piercing I got in my larynx,
And a second, above, in my pharynx.
Now I’ve lost all ability
Articulatory:
I’m as silent as that human-cat sphinx
—Larry Ngx
Two piercings I got in both lips
(That’s one piercing in each—oh semantics!).
Now whenever I tries
To bilablialise
You just hear a couple of clicks.
—Lee Beal
