Enlarging the corpus of clerihews: two entries for Luca Pacioli

Abstract

Devised by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) while still at school, and taking its title from his second name, a “clerihew” is a form of light, usually biographical, verse of two rhyming couplets of irregular metre (Teague, 2012). The first line generally ends with the subject’s name and often contains nothing else, thus setting up the initial rhyming challenge. The rhymes are often eccentric (Teague, 2012), which can be part of the form’s humour. The following well-known example illustrates.Bentley published three collections of clerihews during his lifetime [1], dealing with a mixture of historical and contemporary figures from various fields. Other practitioners of the craft have included writers of the stature of G.K. Chesterton [2], W.H. Auden and J.R.R. Tolkien (Teague, 2012). It is still a frequently attempted form (Seymour-Smith, 1994), and collections of new clerihews continue to appear (e.g. Szirtes and Jackson, 2019, 2022).A perusal of the contents of Bentley’s collected clerihews (Bentley, 1981) reveals no major accounting figures. In assuming the challenge of writing clerihews on accounting subjects, who better to begin with than Luca Pacioli? I offer two attempts here.