Ladies and gennelmen, I bring you "The Charge of the Light Wombat Brigade" (one verse only):
Half a league, half a league,
Riding the wombat
Into the burrow of Swanston
Street, unto combat.
"Go, trusty quadruped!"
"Charge for the lights", she said.
Onto the tram, they lept.
Everyone wondered.
N.B. The above photograph is not to be circulated amongst employers, present or future, second cousins, prospective friends, or shown to the man next door.
12 comments:
Of all curious creatures on the mammalian tree,
None more beffuddlesome than the Wombat could be.
Is it a Womb or is it a Bat?
Is it a Womble cross-bred with a Cat?
Is it the love-child of Whale and Numbat?
It's just a Wombat, and that is that.
Are wondering Wombats 'Wondles' or 'Wondats'?
Is the cognomen of humble wombatters 'Humbat'?
No - they're just a Wombat, and that is that.
Do the Mammalian mammals of the Australian woods
Play Australian games like all Australians should*?
Do the Field Mouses field in Mammalian cricket,
While the wily Wombatsman waddles out to the wicket?
Of all curious creatures on the mammalian tree,
None more beffuddlesome than the Wombat could be.
*Poets licence.
Ha! You outverse me and then some. Does that make you my adversary?
If a wombat and a grasshopper reproduce (heaven forfend) do they produce cricketbats?
I've never seen such a wonderful wombat straddling.
Why, thank you! I took the wombat straddling elective at finishing school, in lieu of crinoline pressing and handkerchief appreciation.
I think it was a choice well made. Time spent straddling is almost never wasted.
From the look of things, and the display of outright skill, you studied for many years under a wizened wombat straddler, a scarred veteran of many a wombatical conflict (womflict, for short), no doubt?
I'd imagine this person was sort of like a gender-neutral cross between Mr Miyagi and Steve Irwin, minus the Japonisme and nationalist psychosis/lack of animal-handling-skills (so, not much like either one of them, really)?
Eh, you know what I mean!
Minus the lack. Some kind of bastard tautology, no doubt.
Replace with 'minus the.../paltry animal-handling skills' at your leisure.
It crosses my mind, looking again at that photograph, that it may have been more decorous - though less Crimean-War-esque - to ride sidesaddle.
"Minus the lack", not so much a tautology conceived out o' wedlock, as a fine specimen of what is known round rhetorological circles as "litotes", which, quoth my Poxford English Lexicon, is "a figure of speech, in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary". (Good for surreptitious insults, &c.)
A good one to know. I'll add it to my lexical warchest.
I did show this pic to my mum, not counting her as a prospective employer or second cousin.
She laughed.
Ya mum!? Oh, all right, then. But only because she's known me since I was thirteen years old.
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