Catching Up

Just about the only thing I have in common with the late Ted Kennedy is that both our last names are dactyls. (I.e. a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed: KEN-uh-dee, DAH-bi-shuh.) In fact, if you write the late senator’s name in full as “Edward M. Kennedy,” it’s a double dactyl: ED-wud-em KEN-uh-dee. This opened up the Lion of the Senate to doggerelists.

Just as true poetry has its forms — sonnet, villanelle, and so on — so does doggerel. One of those forms is the higgledy-piggledy, or double dactyl — “considerably more rigid and difficult to write” than a limerick, says Wikipedia.

The only Ted Kennedy higgledy-piggledy I know of is in Willard R. Espy’s 1975 Almanac of Words at Play. Espy attributes it to one Leonard Miall.