clerihew: M-W's Word of the Day

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The Word of the Day for December 1 is:

clerihew \KLAIR-ih-hyoo\ noun
: a light verse quatrain rhyming aabb and usually dealing with a person named in the initial rhyme

Example sentence:
My favorite of Edmund C. Bentley?s clerihews is the following: ?What I like about Clive / Is that he is no longer alive. / There is a great deal to be said / For being dead.?

Did you know?
Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) was an English writer whose book _Biography for Beginners_ was published in 1906 under the name E. Clerihew. It was a collection of simple, humorous four-line verses about famous people. Bentley had begun writing them as a bored high school student. He didn?t call them clerihews himself, but his readers began to do so after the book appeared. How soon after, we can?t be sure, because so far we?ve unearthed nothing earlier than a 1928 description of clerihews as ?nice slack metres and sly points.? In any case, people have been having fun writing their own clerihews ever since Bentley shared his.

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