Limericks and Word Games

Back in more innocent times, before people had cell phones and the Internet to waste time with in order to take a mental health break during the day at work, my friends and I would have two forms of word play fun. The first was the writing of limericks. They can be very topical and funny, in addition to being wry. For more serious topics, I knew some who wrote haiku, but mostly at work we were looking for a laugh and a smile, so limericks were great fun. While posting on blogs tonight, one came to mind:

There once was a brother named Hitchen,
Who ought sit in corner of kitchen,
cause in obnoxious way,
bout the faith he does bray,
And I'm tired to hear all his b**chen!

We used to be able to produce funny limericks about bosses, colleagues, situations, politics, and it was great fun.

Another word play that was great fun was called hinky-pinky. I used to work drawing maps and we'd all sit in a large room with our drafting tables, talking to pass the time while we worked. This was 30 years ago, so there definitely were no diversions, such as even radio! The game is a riddle, where you would ask the riddle, where the answer was two rhyming words. You'd give the participants a clue by telling the number of syllables in each word. Like a hink-pink is a riddle where the answer is two rhyming one syllable words. For example, "What is very warm jug?" Answer: a hot pot.

If it had two syllable words, it was a hinky-pinky. If each word had three syllables, it was a hinkity-pinkity. One day I thought of a four syllable riddle, a hinkitity-pinkitity and I stumped everyone for hours, ha ha. "What is ancestor worship?" Answer: generation veneration.

Parents who home school might want to consider teaching their children limericks, and hinky-pinky. It's a great way to help our computer enslaved children be more verbal, stretching to use more vocabulary in a fun way!