Sassafras is a beautiful little town, which like my last destination, Kallista, is in the Dandenong Ranges and only about an hour from the Melbourne CBD. Sassafras and Kallista are in fact less than 5 km from each other. Whatever I said about Kallista as a town works for Sassafras too. It's a very cool name, I think and since its last syllable has the emphasis, you only have to rhyme with that, and it rhymes with gas, mass and lass, and of course its own first syllable. I am already having lots of fun thinking of possible cheeky limericks, so I am really looking forward to receiving all your wonderful limericks.

Okay, so there's a problem here that will annoy the hell out of Kalleh. If you pronounce Sassafras correctly, it is virtually impossible to write a metrically satisfactory limerick with it as the A-Rhyme. Consider the following potential first line, with the emphasised syllables in caps:

i MET a GIRL in SASS-a-FRAS ...

Looks good, 8 syllables, but it is not in the limerick rhymthm (meter). It would be fine for the first line of a Quatrain but it's useless for a limerick.

But I have managed to make to work by extending the first line to 10 syllables thus and de-emphasising its first syllable a little:

I once met a girl up in Sassafras ...

Hope you agree that this works

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Greg S,

I assume that you are going to be generous with what constitutes a rhyme.

Technically, even destressing the last syllable, there are no rhymes because the final two syllables would need to be "afras" so unless there are words like bassafras, cassafras or grassafras that I never heard of there can be no rhymes,

Hopefully you will allow the weaker form where the lst two syllables only have to rhyme (in addition, of course to the stressed syllable rhyming with sass) so that

Pass a gas or Gas a pass would be fine.

Well it's not up to me how people choose to rhyme it, but I'm happy with just rhyming the final syllable, for example:

I once met a girl up in Sassafras
And she was indeed a most charming lass ...

quote:

Technically, even destressing the last syllable, there are no rhymes because the final two syllables

No I am destressing the first syllable of Sassafras, as in "sassaFRAS" thus making "charming LASS" a suitable rhyme.

It doesn't work that way because (in your example)
I once met a girl up in Sassafras
the stresses would need to be

i ONCE met a GIRL up in sass-a-FRAS
which has four consecutive unstressed syllables. Destrssing the final syllable kind of works because it gives
i ONCE met a GIRL up in SASS-a-fras

To make it work with a destressed first syllable you have to have the word immediately preceding it as stressed and that is very difficult.

I've always called it SASS-a-fras (e.g "sassafras tea") anyway. But what do I know.

I say it the same way, Hab, and I am not even from the East Coast. This may be another one of those where we'll have to be lenient about our pronunciation of the rhyming word.

I'll get it to you. Sorry for the delay.

Okay, so as seems to be commonplace with the places I choose this one is clearly not going to work, so ...

I'm not gonna cry, but I must tell you why
I've decided I must change the game:
It's really quite dry, but I'm switching to "Rye" -
For rhyming it's a much better name!

In a fortnight I have only received one entry for Sassafras, my own, so I am declaring it the winner as the only entry and the new game to be posted shortly is for the beach-side town of Rye on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula.

For the record here is my winning entry for Sassafras:

I once met a girl up in Sassafras,
Who most of the time is a passive lass,
But get her in bed
And she goes off her head
And asks for it deep up her massive ass!

I had been working on two, but they weren't quite ready. As I have said before, I think Geoff is offline for some reason. Hopefully, it is just a computer problem. I used ass in the one I was working on, too, but thought it might be too risque. Apparently not! LOL

OMG, it is great, Greg! I definitely would have voted for it. I'll send you one tonight about Rye. Sorry about that.