Crambo is a rhyming game which, according to Joseph Strutt, [1] was played as early as the 14th century under the name of the ABC of Aristotle. [2] It is also known as capping the rhyme. The name may also be used to describe a doggerel poem which exhausts the possible rhymes with a particular word.
In the days of the Stuarts it was very popular, and is frequently mentioned in the writings of the time. Thus William Congreve's 1695 play Love for Love, i. 1, contains the passage,
"Get the Maids to Crambo in an Evening, and learn the knack of Rhyming." [2]
The name comes from the Latin crambe and Greek κράμβη krámbē, meaning "cabbage" (as in crambe repetita (Juvenal, satire 7, 154), literally meaning "re-stewed cabbage"). Hence the players started with a rhyme and then "re-stewed" it. [3]
In the early versions of the game up to the eighteenth century, teams would vie with each other to find and express a rhyme for a word or line presented by the opposing player or team. Someone would offer the first rhyme often poking fun at a dignitary; the subsequent lines or couplets would then have to rhyme with this. The verse would be sung to a popular tune of the day and the game collapsed when a player was unable to use his wit to come up with a suitable rhyming word. [4]
Crambo in the nineteenth century became a word game in which one player would think of a word and tell the others what it rhymes with. The others do not name the actual word they guess, but describe its meaning. Thus one might say, "I know a word that rhymes with bird." A second asks, "Is it ridiculous?" "No, it is not absurd." "Is it a group of cows?" "No, it is not a herd." This proceeds until the right word is guessed. [2] [3]
In dumb crambo the guessers, instead of trying to name the rhyme being given them as a clue, express its meaning by acting the word without speaking in the manner of charades. [2]
Samuel Pepys recorded playing in his diary entry of Saturday 19 May 1660: "From thence to the Hague again playing at crambo in the waggon, Mr. Edward, Mr. Ibbott, W. Howe, Mr. Pinkney, and I." [5]
One of Crambo's more famous devotees, Robert Burns (1759–1796), wrote: "Amaist as soon as I could spell, / I to the crambo-jingle fell." [4]
James Boswell (1740–1795) was famous for his skill at the game. One crambo poem from Boswell is rhymed around "the Laird of Craigubble", a fellow Crambo player. One of the stanzas goes:
"To render you bright with choice liquor at night / Take Punch made of rum that is double / And I give you this charge be your Bowl full & large / To content the good Laird of Craigubble."
Each stanza in the poem has the rhyme scheme ABCB, and every stanza ends with "the Laird of Craigubble." [4]
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a frequent dumb crambo player with his wife and daughters in their North London home. [6]
A counting-out game or counting-out rhyme is a simple method of 'randomly' selecting a person from a group, often used by children for the purpose of playing another game. It usually requires no materials, and is achieved with spoken words or hand gestures. The historian Henry Carrington Bolton suggested in his 1888 book Counting Out Rhymes of Children that the custom of counting out originated in the "superstitious practices of divination by lots."
Poetry, also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.
The pantoum is a poetic form derived from the pantun, a Malay verse form: specifically from the pantun berkait, a series of interwoven quatrains.
A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines.
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in the final stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of perfect rhyming is consciously used for a musical or aesthetic effect in the final position of lines within poems or songs. More broadly, a rhyme may also variously refer to other types of similar sounds near the ends of two or more words. Furthermore, the word rhyme has come to be sometimes used as a shorthand term for any brief poem, such as a nursery rhyme or Balliol rhyme.
In poetry, a stanza is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme and metrical schemes, but they are not required to have either. There are many different forms of stanzas. Some stanzaic forms are simple, such as four-line quatrains. Other forms are more complex, such as the Spenserian stanza. Fixed verse poems, such as sestinas, can be defined by the number and form of their stanzas.
A villanelle, also known as villanesque, is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third lines of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form. The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the initial subject of the form being the pastoral.
A limerick is a form of verse that appeared in England in the early years of the 18th century. In combination with a refrain, it forms a limerick song, a traditional humorous drinking song often with obscene verses. It is written in five-line, predominantly anapestic trimeter with a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA, in which the first, second and fifth line rhyme, while the third and fourth lines are shorter and share a different rhyme.
Word play or wordplay is a literary technique and a form of wit in which words used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement. Examples of word play include puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, double entendres, and telling character names.
Charades is a parlor or party word guessing game. Originally, the game was a dramatic form of literary charades: a single person would act out each syllable of a word or phrase in order, followed by the whole phrase together, while the rest of the group guessed. A variant was to have teams who acted scenes out together while the others guessed. Today, it is common to require the actors to mime their hints without using any spoken words, which requires some conventional gestures. Puns and visual puns were and remain common.
James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck, was a Scottish biographer, diarist, and lawyer, born in Edinburgh. He is best known for his biography of his friend and older contemporary, the English writer Samuel Johnson, which is commonly said to be the greatest biography written in the English language. A great mass of Boswell's diaries, letters, and private papers were recovered from the 1920s to the 1950s, and their ongoing publication by Yale University has transformed his reputation.
Doggerel, or doggrel, is poetry that is irregular in rhythm and in rhyme, often deliberately for burlesque or comic effect. Alternatively, it can mean verse which has a monotonous rhythm, easy rhyme, and cheap or trivial meaning.
The Classic of Poetry, also Shijing or Shih-ching, translated variously as the Book of Songs, Book of Odes, or simply known as the Odes or Poetry, is the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, comprising 305 works dating from the 11th to 7th centuries BC. It is one of the "Five Classics" traditionally said to have been compiled by Confucius, and has been studied and memorized by scholars in China and neighboring countries over two millennia. It is also a rich source of chengyu that are still a part of learned discourse and even everyday language in modern Chinese. Since the Qing dynasty, its rhyme patterns have also been analysed in the study of Old Chinese phonology.
Pall-mall, paille-maille, palle-maille, pell-mell, or palle-malle is a lawn game that was mostly played in the 16th and 17th centuries. It is considered a precursor to croquet.
This glossary of literary terms is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in the discussion, classification, analysis, and criticism of all types of literature, such as poetry, novels, and picture books, as well as of grammar, syntax, and language techniques. For a more complete glossary of terms relating to poetry in particular, see Glossary of poetry terms.
This is a glossary of poetry.
A bawbee was a Scottish sixpence. The word means a debased copper coin, valued at six pence Scots, issued from the reign of James V of Scotland to the reign of William II of Scotland. They were hammered until 1677, when they were produced upon screw presses.
Sonnet 78 is one of 154 sonnets published by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare in 1609. It is one of the Fair Youth sequence, and the first of the mini-sequence known as the Rival Poet sonnets, thought to be composed some time from 1598 to 1600.
Bait Bazi is a verbal game and a genre of Urdu poetry played by composing verses of Urdu poems. The game is common among Urdu speakers in Pakistan and India. It is similar to Antakshari, the Sistanian Baas-o-Beyt, the Malayalam Aksharaslokam and, more generally, the British Crambo.
Poetic devices are a form of literary device used in poetry. Poems are created out of poetic devices via a composite of: structural, grammatical, rhythmic, metrical, verbal, and visual elements. They are essential tools that a poet uses to create rhythm, enhance a poem's meaning, or intensify a mood or feeling.