Getting your ’rick rolling: What we’re looking for in a Style Invitational limerick

The Style Invitational is renowned for all sorts of clever, irreverent humor and wordplay in its close to two decades’ worth of varied contests. Some is free-form, off the wall, while other contests state specific parameters in addition to the overarching requirement to Be Funny and Clever. Our limerick contests — like this week’s Limerixicon — belong to the latter group — hewing perfectly to a meter and rhyme scheme is one of the things that make limericks and other light verse funny.

The Style Invitational

The Style Invitational is The Post’s weekly humor/wordplay contest, serving up since 1993 an irreverent mix of highbrow and lowbrow -- haughty and potty -- in genres ranging from neologisms to cartoon captions to elaborate song parodies. A new contest appears at washingtonpost.com/styleinvitational every Friday.

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When we ask for a limerick, we want it to observe the following rules. Some of them are more rigid than some standards; others are more lax. The rules sound technical, but really they’re just explaining the concepts of rhyme and meter that you’ve probably grasped since nursery school. They’re pretty much the same standards as the ones used at OEDILF.com — the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form — to which you’re also welcome to submit your “Limerixicon” limericks once the results of our contest are published Sept. 2. In fact, I’m stealing some of the Oedilfers’ stuff right off their wiki.

For the purposes of our contest, this is what a limerick is:

■It’s five lines long.

■The rhyme scheme is AABBA — that means Lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyme with one another, and Lines 3 and 4 rhyme with each other. (See “What a rhyme is” below.)

■Limericks traditionally are made up of anapests; an anapest is the three-beat rhythm “da-da-DAH.” As OEDILF puts it:
So the basic form is:

da da DAH / da da DAH / da da BING
da da DAH / da da DAH / da da DING
da da DAH / da da BAM
da da DAH / da da WHAM
da da DAH / da da DAH / da da PING

Here’s an example of an Invitational limerick that’s exactly in the form above, by Stephen Gold of Glasgow, Scotland, whose very clever lims appear in both the Invite and OEDILF. I’ll boldface all the strong beats, the ones in all-caps above:

“I’ll be brief,” said the pelican. “We
Are so similar, me and BP;
Tarred and feathered. Those spills
Mean we both have huge bills.
High and dry, we’re completely at sea.”

■But they don’t have to start and finish with anapests! The Empress (as well as OEDILF) does NOT care if all the lines begin with the two weak beats of an anapest, and end with a strong beat. Instead, they can begin with one weak beat, or just come right in on the strong beat. Likewise, at the end of the line, you can add one or more weak beats as part of an extended rhyme (e.g., TALK-ing and WALK-ing; CRED-ible and ED-ible).

■In other words, what you absolutely must have, in each line, are strong beats separated by two weak beats.

In Lines 1, 2 and 5, that sounds like “HICK-or-y DICK-or-y DOCK.”
In Lines 3 and 4, that sounds like “DICK-or-y DOCK.”

But you certainly may have the extra weak beats at the beginning and ends of the lines — in fact, there should be at least one weak beat (better, two) between the last strong beat of one line and the first strong beat of the next line; there shouldn’t be two strong beats in a row. Those two weak beats can be on the same line, or at the end of one and the beginning of the next. But Lines 1, 2 and 5 must all end with the same number of weak beats (if any), as must Lines 3 and 4.