There was an old man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter Nan
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
The pair of them went to Manhasset,
The man and his Nan with the asset.
Pa followed them there
But they left in a tear
And as for the asset, Manhasset.
He followed them next to Pawtucket,
Nan and her man and the bucket.
Pa said to the man,
"You can keep my sweet Nan",
But as for the bucket, Pawtucket.
(This works best if you pronounce "Pa" as "paw", assuming you make any difference between the two -- in New England, there definitely is. If your "aw" sounds like "ah", you can hear the "aw" sound the rest of us use by saying "Awwwwwwwwww!")
Here's the trio's route:
note the doubling back
to avoid pursuit.
View Larger Map
5 comments:
If this isn't the most timely coincidence...
Xkcd just posted about his new LimerickDB.
Thanks for the tip, Arthaey.
Hmm. A lot of classics in there, a lot of old chestnuts (same thing from a different perspective), and a lot of would-be limericists who don't know where the stressed syllable of clitoris is.
Whether they know where the referent is, that I leave up to others.
I'd love to see a similar map for John Forster's wonderful song "Entering Marion".
And on the subject of limericks, well, here are a few of dubious origin.
It's easy to create these things with Google Maps. You switch to the "Get directions" tab and enter the start and end cities at the top, then use "Add Destination" at the bottom of the left frame to add the other places, and then drag them about (using the boxes with the - signs next to each city to make the detailed directions disappear).
"The city" must be Boston, and I arbitrarily defined "Cape Cod" as Chatham. So here is the original route (which requires a bit of a detour to enter Marion at all, in fact); here is the second, which is pretty loony, as Cape Cod is south of Boston and Beverly and Sharon are north of it, and here is the third route, which is completely insane. Somehow I think yer man was looking at a list of town names, not a map.
As for the limericks, they satisfy all the required formal properties of limericks except wit.
Oops. Beverly is north of Boston all right, but Sharon is west of it.
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