Let's See, Iridanos....

The river that runs through the Keramikos cemetery in Athens is called the Iridanos.  Sounds entirely unfunereal to me;  belongs in some kind of pastoral frolic:

By the banks of the River Iridanos,
In a manner not seldom forbidanos,

We disported ourselves
Midst the faeries and elves

Lascivious, lewd and libidanos.

From the Bin: Legal Ethics

Ah, this takes me back. I wrote (or do you say “coined” or maybe “tossed off”) this in the fall of ’93 when I was teaching at Penn Law School. One of my `colleagues talked the alumni bulletin into printing it, but then the dean got a look at it; his bowels turned to water and into the file it went, only to emerge today, blinking and bewildered.

I admit, I am probably not the first limerick-writer (limericist?) to rhyme “-adelphia” and “telfia.” Anyway:

A lawyer from old Philadlephia
Told his client, “the lies that I tellfia

Are venal, not vicious—
Whatever your wishes,

I surely will not hazard hellfia."

Thanks. Folks, I’ve got a million of ‘em.

The Universal Language

This must be the easiest-to-remember limerick:

I once knew a lady of Spain
Who cried, "let us do it again!

And again! And again!
And again, and again!

And again and again and again!"

It turns out that romance is the same in any language. Here’s the Greek version:

I once saw a lass from Marsala*
Tucked snug in the grass with her fella,

She told her ephebos**,
“You must never leave us! Oh

Poioumen alla kai alla!”***

*Western Sicily, lots of Greek influence out there.
**Modern Greek beta=v, so I win.
***Hey, I tried for Greek script, couldn't figure out how to make it work.