(16) Thirty Days of Grateful Praise: Wordplay

This picture has nothing to do with wordplay, really. But it makes me laugh.

Like most bloggers, I love the comments I get on my posts.  Sometimes, I’ve even thought that the comments were better than my post.   Sometimes they move me to tears; sometimes, they make me laugh out loud with delight.

This afternoon, a comment on my previous post made me laugh out loud with delight.  It also inspired the idea for today’s Grateful Praise.

Alert readers may have noticed a wee bit of alliteration in my previous post— a plentiful plethora, a playful plural profusion of “P’s”:

…one of the perils of persistently posting daily is the propensity to ponder the possibility that your readers will tire of hearing about your quotidian life and be coming to your blog only out of a sense of obligation.”

Yes, I love words, and I love playing with words.   I always have.  Back when I used to enter poetry in contests, judges would write things like, “Alliteration in poem is intrusive and distracting!”  That always made me laugh, because I thought a poem should be the very place you could feel free to play with words.

And speaking of wordplay and poetry, I’ve always loved limericks.  No, not the vulgar kind, though I’m sure some of those are very clever.  I like the silly kind.  In fact, one of my favorite limericks ever was the very first one I learned:

A flea and a fly in a flue

Were imprisoned so what could they do?

Said the fly, “Let us flee!”

Said the flea, “Let us fly!”

So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

When I learned this around the age of seven, I could not stop saying it.  I thought it the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard.

So imagine my delight when I found in my comments today a limerick that someone wrote just for me!  And not only did they write me my own personal limerick, but they alluded to my alliteration and found it alluring.   An alliteration ally!   Here’s their wonderful and altogether winsome wordplay:

The burden of browsing a blog
Is hardly so much of a slog
When the erudite author
Betakes of the bother
Of a six-word alliterative jog.

 They signed simply as “A poet,” so I’m not sure I’ll ever know who they are.  But whoever you are, I am grateful, my illustrious alliterative ally.  I loved your lovely lighthearted limerick.