There Once Was a Lawyer Named Rex

Experts claim that regularly partaking your evening meal with your children will promote their social skills or at least dampen their antisocial skills, or something. Whatever the impact, we're in the habit of doing so (though not quite every night), and things do come up for discussion at the table.

Such as the limerick. Lilly didn't know the term, so I suppose it's about time she did. Probably she knows the rhyme pattern whether she knows its name or not. I was hard pressed to think of an example because (1) I'm not good at remembering that kind of thing (jokes, either); and (2) some of those I can remember I'm not going to tell my 12-year-old daughter. She'll have to hear them from someone else.

There's something Disneyfied about clean limericks, anyway. But I did my best to make up a clean example, so she might remember what a limerick is. It's a poor specimen, but here it is:

There once was a man named Magoo
Who cooked up a really big stew
He used chicken feet
Which was pretty neat
But in the end it tasted like glue

More suggestive than dirty is one the late Ned Nabors, my Latin professor, told me, and which I actually remember after nearly 30 years. It was one he knew that used a Latin line, de minimis non curat lex, which is a legal maxim meaning "the law does not care about trifles [or small things]." I didn't tell it to Lilly because it seemed too complicated to explain right now. Maybe later.

There once was a lawyer named Rex
Who was poorly equipped for sex
When charged with exposure
He said with composure
"De minimis non curat lex"