A celebration of the limerick will be held next month when the Friends of Limerick Club put on a King and Queen Pageant and challenge the entrants to recite their own compositions.
That Limerick should remember the work it has given to the English language is entirely appropriate. The event was to have been held on May 27th but had to be cancelled after a group of local rugby players decided to qualify for the European Cup final.
Next Saturday's game between Munster and Northampton in Twickenham will captivate the region to the exclusion of all else.
Ms Deirdre Hayes, club chairwoman, said the group was forced to postpone the event until June 10th.
The club was formed to promote the heritage and culture of the area, and to publicise littleknown facts such as the county having 410 castles, a greater number than any other county.
"We felt our good news and fun events never appeared in the national press," Ms Hayes said.
"We have no marketing person for Limerick, and one of the main aims of our club is to campaign for someone to market Limerick to be appointed by the corporation."
Two years ago the 2FM presenter Gerry Ryan agreed to host the first King and Queen Pageant. It has become an annual event as a kind of light-hearted Rose of Tralee festival. Competitors are judged on their wit, humour and appearance, and as a couple "who would be good ambassadors for Limerick," Ms Hayes said.
Ger Lee of the Holman-Lee modelling agency, which is organising the event, says entrants will be teamed off as couples before the judging. "Gerry Ryan will ask a couple of questions. Last year and the year before, it was a limited age group. This year, it is completely open."
A side competition is the judging of the limericks, which may be composed beforehand by colleagues. Although the limerick form is firmly fixed in the popular mind, one definition is that it is "a five-line stanza in spondaic hexameter, alternating with amphibrachs and amphimacers".
Its origins are less precise. One theory is that the limerick was first seen in 1846 in Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense. Collins Dictionary explains that it allegedly came from "Will you come up to Limerick", "a refrain sung between nonsense verses at a party".
But the preferred Limerick version is that the name originated with the Maigue school of Gaelic poets in the second half of the 18th century, who took their name from a river in the county, frequented a bar owned by John O'Tuomy, The Gay, in the city's Mungret Street.
According to Ms Hayes, Mr O'Tuomy had a relaxed approach to serving beer and would request a verse in limerick form if the customer was broke. A translated poem, repeated by the artist Desmond Kinney, goes: Should one of the stock of the noble Gael/ A brother bard or a traveller bold/ Be short of the price of a glass of strong ale/O'Tuomy welcomes him in from the cold.
The pub did not survive, but the tradition of composing limericks has prospered, and enjoyed greater popularity through the Internet.
The Limerick competition has already had its success story. Ms Ruth Scott, a former presenter on the local Limerick 95FM radio station, was an entrant in 1998. Now she has her own 2FM programme.
Among the entrants this year are personalities from Lyric FM and the Limerick Evening Echo. The King and Queen Pageant will be held at the Two Mile Inn, Limerick, on June 10th.