"Their suggestion was slovenly. Also slipshod, slapdash, shoddy, and schlocky — and those are just the ‘s’s."

Said Stuart Silverstein, speaking of esses, who has proved that Dorothy Parker wrote some things published in Life Magazine in the 1920s and who doesn't want to simply stick this material at the end of the third edition of her book "Not Much Fun," as the publisher, Scribner, requested.

Quoted in a London Times piece that highlights its opinion that the stuff is bad: "What would you do for money? Dorothy Parker wrote bad poetry/Verses anonymously published in Life magazine in 1928 have been identified as the work of the American poet."

The four poems are all about a daring girl who goes for a ride in some fellow’s car and all are titled Maybe She Didn’t Have On Her Walking-Shoes. The last of them, and perhaps the best, is a limerick about a “young lady named Maude/Who drove out with a man in a Faude” and has the payoff line: “And everyone murmured ‘My Gaude!’”

How is that bad in some way that other Dorothy Parker things would not have to also be called bad?

Anyway, I confess to spending some time wondering what's a "Faude"? Some bygone car brand like Pierce-Arrow? And I understood "Gaude" immediately. I like the idea of doing conventional limericks but instead of setting them up with a name that easily rhymes with 2 other words you'll use later beginning with a name that skews the other 2 words into a form that forces unexpected spellings and pronunciations.

Life, by the way, published the poem under the heading "College Humor." Does that suggest Parker didn't want her name associated with it or that Life was using the designation it thought most likely to win readers? In that light, Silverstein seems to be campaigning for more readers, making a controversy out of the placement of the newly attributed poems within the old collection, and perhaps this will convince Scribner to let him treat the "new" poems as deserving to be tucked around inside the old collection instead of plunked together at the end.