Competition | 19 June 2010

In Competition No. 2651 you were invited to submit limericks that are also tongue-twisters.

Thanks to J. Seery for suggesting this fiendish assignment. It is not easy to produce a true tongue-twister within the confines of the meter and rhyme scheme of the limerick.

Perhaps the suggestion was inspired by Lou Brooks’s Twimericks: The Book of Tongue-Twisting Limericks, which I happen to have been reading to my young son. He finds my pitiful attempts at articulating ‘Flapjack Jack flipped flat flapjacks at Phil’ hilarious, but ‘Flapjack Jack’ is a piece of cake compared with some of your offerings. Gillian Ewing, Jane Dards and Virginia Price-Evans all reduced me to lisping incoherence.

The quirky, comical and fluency-defying best of the bunch are printed below. They earn their authors £9 apiece.

On Scafell Serena saw sheep
And summed them to send her to sleep:
    She said to them ‘Shoo!’
    Should her snooze then ensue?
No, the sheep found the slope slightly steep.