Apples and Pairs (for fun)

The limerick is—or ought to be—the poetic genre ideally suited to the blogosphere: Short and pithy, quotable and memorable, feisty and funny and fine. And sometimes, just sometimes, it actually reveals a kernel of wisdom through the show of wit. Here are two eminent examples, from the respective fields of lapsarian theology and linguistic zoology:

St. Augustine thought he had found
The sin by which mankind is bound:
“It was not,” so said he,
“The fruit on the tree,
But the lust of the pair on the ground.”
—Bob L. Staples

The bustard’s an exquisite fowl
With minimal reason to growl:
He escapes what would be
Illegitimacy
By the grace of a fortunate vowel.
—George Vaill

Via Liberating the Limerick by Ernest W. Lefever.