Yes, Virginia, There Are Snapdragons
“Please tell me where limericks come from.
Of course, I already asked Mum.”
“Dear, research reflects
they’re not very complex
but they’re far more than parts of their sum.”
“But let’s start online: Mentalfloss
has an article I’ve come across.
Twenty-three words sans rhyme
which, in fact, rhyme sometime
proves you often must floss away dross.”
“Let’s take ‘gulf’—that’s a difficult rhyme,
though a common word heard all the time.
It rhymes both with sulf
and the fluff we call culf
which is what pillows puff when they mime.”
“Sulf is the word that I’ll choose
for the limerick that I’ll write and use
to explain where they’re from
because antirrhinum
is a toadflax, a plant that we’ll muse.”
“Toadflax and sulf are the same,
like a rose which has more than one name.
Snapdragons belong
to the toadflax/sulf throng
(common scents says they’re not of rose fame).”
“But sulf doesn’t always belong
in the fields where their roots have grown strong,
and that’s where they’re weeds
so we try to stop seeds
that they spread, though bees buzz their own song.”
“To interweave all that we’ve learned
about snapdragons (weeds where they’re spurned!),
we’ll wrap this up tightly
with prose which will rightly
confirm that their limerick’s earned:”
“First, on the website Mentalfloss, we find ‘23 Notoriously Unrhymable Words (That Actually Have Rhymes).’ These include ‘gulf’ which rhymes with ‘culf,’ an old southwest English word for the loose feathers that come out of pillows and cushions, and with ‘sulf,’ which is another name for toadflax.”
“Next, Wikipedia tells us toadflax is the common name of several related genera of plants in the plantain family Plantaginaceae. This includes chaenorhinum, cymbalaria, linaria, misopates, nuttallanthus, and antirrhinum, also known as snapdragons, which are considered weeds wherever they are not native plants.”
“Now we simply concatenate this conglomeration of collected cognitive constituencies into a limerick combining the appropriate architecture with artistic artifice and adequate assonance:”
“Snapdragons are antirrhinum.
They’re toadflax—weeds where they’re not from.
Sometimes they’re called sulf,
(one of two rhymes for gulf),
and you see where this limerick comes from.”