I appeal to all you brilliant people for help

[derien]

I was reading "The Shanty Book, Part I; Sailor Shanties" a few days (or possibly weeks) ago, and I hit this kind of like a wall...

I have had to camouflage many unprintable expressions, and old sailors will readily recognize where this has been done. Sometimes a whole verse (after the first line) has needed camouflage, and the method adopted is best expressed as follows:
There was a young lady of Gloucester
Who couldn't eat salt with her egg,
And when she sat down
She could never get up,
And so the poor dog had none.

Does anyone have any idea what the hell he means by that?!?

Comments

[catya.livejournal.com]

There are a couple with that first line that are easy to find:

There was a young lady of Gloucester
Whose friends they thought they had lost her
Till they found on the grass
The marks of her arse,
And the knees of the man who had crossed her.

i'm assuming it's random lines from other limericks after the first line?

[derien.livejournal.com]

The random lines that weren't risque? But how are we meant to decode that? I mean, that's like "you'll know, if you already know." How's that educating?

[innocentsmith.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Maybe the point is that it is so weird and disconnected, as though chunks of completely different songs (or in this case limericks) have been transplanted in to cover up the dirty parts, despite not making any damn sense or even rhyming? So you get sort of a crazy quilt of the only clean lines in otherwise dirty songs.

(With a hey-nonny-nonny and a hot cha cha.)

[derien.livejournal.com]

And every time I look at this comment I start singing the Hey Nonny Nonny song by the Violent Femmes.

My despair is that if whole lines are transplanted, and I don't even know the slang of the time, how am I ever going to guess what might have been in there? I must roundly curse the 'morals' of the publishers of that time period which are now blocking me from learning more about their time!