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Mar 13, 2015
This week’s themePoetic forms This week’s words clerihew epigram cento limerick doggerel This week's comments AWADmail 663 Next week's theme Words with all vowels ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Gargdoggerel
PRONUNCIATION:
MEANING:
noun: 1. Comic verse that is irregular in rhythm and in rhyme especially for burlesque or comic effect. 2. Trivial or bad poetry. NOTES:
Here’s poet John Skelton (c. 1463-1529) defending his doggerels:
For though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged, Rudely rain-beaten, Rusty and moth-eaten, If ye take well therewith, It hath in it some pith. ETYMOLOGY:
Dogs have a bad rap in the language (see dog’s chance,
dogsbody) and the word doggerel
reflects that view. The word is apparently a diminutive of the
word dog. Earliest documented use: 1405.
USAGE:
“In the first world war 324,000 Australians volunteered to fight overseas,
an extraordinary number in a nation of fewer than 5m people. Of the 60,000
Australians who died in the war, 8,700 were lost in a few months during a
hopeless attempt to capture Gallipoli, a small piece of territory in Turkey.
In the words of a piece of doggerel at the time, ‘In five minutes flat,
we were blown to hell / Nearly blew us right back to Australia.’” Obituary: Alec Campbell; The Economist (London, UK); Jun 1, 2002. See more usage examples of doggerel in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life. -Giorgos Seferis, writer, diplomat, Nobel laureate (13 Mar 1900-1971)
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