Limericks, but not from Limerick

The late Frank McCourt made Limerick famous through his writing, but he never wrote, as far as I know, a single limerick. A limerick is a funny five-line rhyming poem, often rude and beginning with a line such as "There was a young lady called Blunt" or "There was a young man from Nantucket".

Chris Strolin is not from Limerick, but he is the world's greatest limerick writer. It's said that he has composed 3,500 of them and has helped edit another 30,000. You see, Chris is in charge of one of the most bizarre projects in history: rewriting the Oxford English Dictionary in limericks. The goal of the OEDILF (The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form) is one limerick for each meaning of every word in the English language. Not quite five years old, the OEDILF now has more than 50,000 limericks, starting at Aa- and going through Dh-. Some are very clever.

Consider this curious word:
He who steals cows from your herd
Commits the infraction
That's known as abaction
(But rustling's the term that's preferred).

By the way, it's not just linguists who love limericks. David Morin of the Harvard Department of Physics has created a page of physics limericks. Some are very clever.