Monday Morning Punch

Mary had a little lamb
The doctors were surprise.

I watch very little television these days. And if ever I do, it's Bob the Builder, The Wheels on the Bus, Barney (yikes!), or collections of baby songs and nursery rhymes. So instead of waiting for my brain to turn to much, why not have a bit of fun with it?

Why not pass some of these nursery rhymes through a lipogram sieve? In a lipogram, a particular letter of the alphabet is deliberately omitted from a piece of verse or prose. Andy West's novel, Lost and Found (2002), is an extreme example: The whole novel does not contain the letter e (So I guess he can't call it a novel then; rather, it's a story).

Here's A. Ross Eckler's (nope, don't know him either; check Wikipedia if you're curious) version of Mary had a little lamb, omitting all occurrences of the letter A:

Polly owned one little sheep,
Its fleece shone white like snow,
Every region where Polly went
The sheep did surely go;
He followed her to school one time,
Which broke the rigid rule;
The children frolicked in their room
To see the sheep in school.

Eckler went even further, removing half the letters from the alphabet and coming up with this version which uses only A, C, D, E, H, I, L, M, N, P, R, S, and T:

Maria had a little sheep,
As pale as rime its hair,
And all the places Maria came
The sheep did tail her there;
In Maria’s class it came at last,
A sheep can’t enter there;
It made the children clap their hands
A sheep in class, that’s rare.

Eckler has three other versions. He seems to have too much time on his hands, doesn't he? Well, he's not alone. Dave Morice wrote a version using one-syllable words:

Young May had a wee small lamb; its fleece was white as snow,
And to each place that young May went, the lamb was sure to go.
It trailed her to her school one day; that broke some sort of rule.
It made the kids all laugh and play to see a lamb in school.

Here's his two-syllable version:

Mary purchased tiny lambkin, snowlike fleeces covered.
Every pathway Mary traveled, lambkin surely hovered.
Lambkin followed Mary schoolward, countered legal ruling
Making playful children chuckle, seeing lambkin's schooling.

Morice also had a three-syllable version, which I think is crappy and not worth including. To be fair, Morice wrote other versions, including parodying Mary in a Shakespearean sonnet, using only four-letter words, writing from the lamb's viewpoint, and on and on. Like Eckler, Morice didn't seem to have much of a social life either.

Richard Lederer, self-professed verbivore, and author of Crazy English as well as other wonderful books, came up with this initial letter acrostic:

Mary had a little lamb,
A ram with fleece like snow.
Reacting to where Mary went,
Young sheep was sure to go.
Lamb followed her to school one day
A flouting of the rule,
Making children laugh and play.
Beholding lamb in school.

Other authors, of course, are simply twisted:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.
Now Mary found the price of meat too high
Which really didn't please her.
Tonight she is having the leg of lamb,
The rest is in the freezer.

I'm sure there are other, more pornographic version out there, but here's where I end this post.