April 8, 2003

1.)      Tulip cup of red
           Doubling over to wet earth,
           Toppled by grey rain.        (Haiku)

2.)       Professor Steven Pinker
           Is a language tinker.
           He studies diverse grammar
           To find out how we yammer.   
                                               (Clerihew)

          Anarchist Avram Noam Chomsky
          Does not advocate the bombsky.
          By profession he's a linguist
          He'll hammer at grammar if you insist.                                                   (Clerihew) 

Did You Know?

Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) was an English writer whose book Biography for Beginners was published in 1906 under the name E. Clerihew. It was a collection of simple, humorous four-line verses about famous people. Bentley had begun writing them as a bored high school student. He didn't call them clerihews himself, but his readers began to do so after the book appeared. How soon after, we can't be sure, because so far we've unearthed nothing earlier than a 1914 description of clerihews as "epigram[s] in hartogs, which are, of course, one’s oldest and most comfortable clothes." In any case, people have been having fun writing their own clerihews ever since Bentley shared his.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/clerihew