Project in rhyme is taking its time
There once was a dictionary buff / who defined words with limericks — it’s tough!
One man’s joke has become his mission: to give each word a rhyming definition.
Chris Strolin was teasing English buffs online years ago when he said the dictionary should be rewritten in the singsong rhyme scheme of limericks. He ended up embracing the absurd bravado of his own wisecrack and decided to try it for real.
He started with the word “a” — “It’s used with a noun to convey/ A singular notion/ Like ‘a duck’ or ‘a potion’ ” — and kept going. More than 1,000 contributors have joined him, off and on, over the years.
The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form (OEDILF) has published more than 97,000 rhyming definitions since Strolin started it in 2004. The retired Air Force radio operator from Bellville, Ill., says his project is on track to publish its 100,000th limerick in 2018.
He hopes his grandchildren — or perhaps their kids — will finish the job decades from now.
The online wisecrack that led to the OEDILF’s origin was a teasing swipe Strolin made at the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, which defines 600,000 words across 20 printed volumes. Strolin remarked that the Oxford dictionary was good, but needed improvement. His not-soserious solution: limericks.
“The more I got to thinking about it, it sounded like a good idea,” Strolin said. “The limerick is probably the most reader-friendly of all types of poetry. It’s also one of the easiest forms of poetry to write.”
Perhaps not so easy: Writing a lim- erick that weaves a joke into an accurate explanation of word’s meaning. Take contributor Bill Middleton’s definition of “adult”: “As a kid, I was wild and a clown. As a teen, I would dash about town. Now adult, I shall go Very cautious and slow. Goes to prove: what grows up must calm down.”
The definitions run the gamut from the unwieldy adjective “aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic” — coined centuries ago to describe the spa waters of Bath, England — to terms that didn’t exist until recently.
The online dictionary currently stops in the Gs at “gizzard.”
That leaves nearly three-fourths of the alphabet still undefined. Assuming the project outlives him, Strolin estimates writers following in his keystrokes will finish the Zs around the year 2076.
“People have said: I’ve got a great limerick for ‘vacuum cleaner,’ ” Strolin said. “And I tell them: Great! Give it to your grandkids.”