The Roycroft Dictionary - Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days.

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Title: The Roycroft Dictionary - Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days.
Author: Hubbard, Elbert, 1856-1915
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Roycroft Dictionary - Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days." ***

THE ROYCROFT DICTIONARY

CONCOCTED
_by
Ali Baba and the Bunch
on_
RAINY DAYS

DONE INTO A
PRINTED BOOK BY THE
ROYCROFTERS AT THEIR SHOP FOR
THE DIVERTISEMENT OF
THE GLOOMSTERS
MCMXIV

ADVERTISING: The education of the public as to who you are, where you
are, and what you have to offer in way of skill, talent or commodity.
The only man who should not advertise is the man who has nothing to
offer the world in way of commodity or service.

ABEL: The first squealer.

ABHORRENCE: 1. A pronounced feeling of dislike in the presence of what
is superior or unattainable. 2. To discover one's real self and to
slander somebody or something else in revenge. 3. A form of hate that
suffers from _mal de mer_.

ASBESTOS: 1. The white-hope of the damned. 2. A specially prepared paper
upon which _The Philistine_ is printed.

ARSON: To be careless in the use of fire. (General Sherman was at times
more or less careless in the use of fire on his March to the Sea.--_Hon.
Henry W. Grady._)

AERONAUT: A person who goes up in order to come down. Hence, a meta
physician.

ABNORMAL: To have intelligence, character or genius; to be less stupid
than one's neighbor; to be better than the worst; to be one's self. _E.
g._, the writer of these lines.

ABODE: 1. A place where one cleans one's teeth and occasionally sleeps.
2. A long counter with a gutter and a rail at the bottom over which one
is served with any liquid in a glass. 3. Dwelling, fireside (obsolete in
this sense). 4. A grave.

ABNEGATION: A plan for securing the thing in the easiest and surest way.

ACADEMIC: 1. Of, or pertaining to, fossils; vegetative; parasitic; the
opposite of change, viable, evolution. 2. Relating to a society that
promotes the love of the static and the immobile. 3. Apish, parrot-like,
phonographic.

ADIEU: A prayer of thanksgiving uttered at parting.

ACQUAINTANCE: Any one we bow to politely at the opera or shake hands
with warmly in a barroom, but whom we would kick out of our homes.
Hence, any one who has refused us a loan.

ACT: 1. Thought in motion. 2. An actor who says he gets three thousand a
week.

ABYSS: 1. The measureless gulf between literature and the American
magazine. 2. The distance between a thinker and an editorial writer.

ARMY: A body of humanitarians that seeks to impress on another body of
men the beauty of non-resistance, by exterminating them.

ABORIGINE: 1. A natural, unaffected person; one who has no conscience,
who is honest, upright, and always at war. 2. A Deist, a Pantheist, who
sees God in everything and feels His presence everywhere, even in his
cannibalistic rites; hence, the first thinker in any country. 3. One who
hates civilization and the _Ladies' Hum Journal_. 4. Any one who is
mulcted, robbed, murdered, butchered, betrayed, in the name of
progress.

ANARCHIST: 1. A Christian dilettante; one who casts a shadow on tomorrow
while waiting for the Greek Kalends. 2. A mouther of sublime inanities.
3. One who maps and surveys the air and constructs dainty Utopias with
the building-blocks quarried from his unbelievable credulity. 4. In the
insane asylum of idealists, a man who imagines himself to be God. 5. A
militant bourgeois who has deserted both Rome and Reason because he can
not stand competition.

AMERICAN PLAN: A scheme for shortening human life through overeating.

ANANIAS: 1. The first ad-writer. 2. Any person who adapts the truth to
his needs. 3. An ancient Saint George who slew the dragon Truth--hence,
any popular hero or revealer who displays his grinders.

AGRICULTURIST: One who makes his money in town and blows it in the
country.

ANGER: 1. A violent blushing and scampering up and down of the blood
upon hearing the truth about ourselves; an epileptic condition produced
by the presentation of a bill that is not yet due, just due, or overdue.
A sudden tumescence of the ego and a furious exaltation of verbal powers
upon losing a collar-button. 2. Before election, the righteous wrath of
a candidate in the presence of evils that he has invented; after
election-day, his wail in the presence of the grave he did not dig. _E.
g._, The devil (taking final leave of the Lord): "I am in anger with
thee, Sire." The Lord: "For thee, son, 't will be a long time between
heavens. So go to Hell and take thine Anger with thee."

ADMISSION: 1. To lie frankly and truthfully about something that can not
possibly incriminate you. 2. To go into a place where one is not wanted;
as, "A burglar gained admission to my house."

ADMIRATION: 1. The smile of Spite. 2. To secretly wish evil to one who
has given us pleasure. 3. A form of shamefaced flattery. 4. To murder
and go scot-free. _E. g._, "I admire him very much." "Ah, so that is the
reason he has become thoughtful!" From Bean's _Meditations of a
Vegetarian_.

AFTERWARD: A space of time in which something happens after something
else has happened, as, life, death; love, disillusion; riches, gout;
wine, headache; unselfishness, regret.

ASSEMBLY: The Pantheon of the mediocre.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: 1. Auto-intoxication. 2. Things which no one else will
say about you, and which therefore you have to say of yourself.

APOSTLE: 1. A machine for recording a lie. 2. A person who has grown
round-shouldered from following the spoor of another. 3. A lickspittle
needed by philosophers in their business.

ALBANY: 1. A place beyond which Henry Hudson could not go. 2. The lobby
of the White House. 3. Famous in history by the biennial meetings of the
Blackmailers' Club. 4. Any place wherein a capitol is burned at a
pre-established psychological moment. (There is a famous proverb which
says, "Those who are in Albany escaped Sing Sing, and those who are in
Sing Sing were on their way to Albany.")

ATHENS: See Pericles and Aspasia.

ART: 1. The vengeance of the Ideal on the Real. 2. Anything done by a
man or a woman on paper, canvas, marble or a musical keyboard that
people pretend to understand, and sometimes buy. 3. The antithesis of
whatever becomes popular in the cultured world. 4. To cast out the
dragons of virtue and hypocrisy by committing some imaginary sin and
telling the world about it. 5. The beautiful way of doing things. 6. The
expression of a man's joy in his work. 7. A matter of hair-cut and
neckties. 8. The uplifting of the beautiful so that all may see and
enjoy. 9. The utilization of love's exhaust. 10. Love's by-product.

ART-COLLECTOR: A man who operates a morgue for things rich, rare and
precious.

ATHEIST: Any man who does not believe in himself.

ATHLETE MEX: Any man who throws the bull.

ATONEMENT: 1. Embolism of the will. 2. To raise a sin from a vice to a
virtue. 3. A borax that kills the vermin of remorse, but that can not be
relied upon to kibosh their breeding-place. 4. An immunity-bath in
preparation for transgressions to come. (Among certain religious sects,
the Day of Atonement is the day on which all gonofs line up for a fresh
start.)

ATTENTION: Concentration of the mind on whatever will ultimately put
something in the pocket; hence, in law and politics, the frame-up.

BACK: 1. That part of the body to which your friend directs his remarks
when he tells you the truth. 2. A smooth surface composed of skin and
bones which stretches between Land's End and John O'Groat's.

BAL-MASQUE: The coronation of Mephisto.

BALIVORAX: A Battle Creek Bellifiller, made from selected fidoes,
fuddies, fresh freddies, chibots and chitterlings. Ladies love it,
babies cry for it, and men who eat it are loved by the ladies who love
it who have babies who cry for it. This is the filler fidgeted for by
Juno before she weaned Hercules--who was no bottle-baby--and fed to him
afterward. Ask your Bagpiper and take no other.

BEATITUDE: A rare and evanescent mental state caused by the reception of
money that one has not earned. Synonyms: Windfall, remittance.

BEGGAR: A robber who has lost his nerve--a bandit with a streak of
yellow in his ego.

BIDDLE: The act of introducing a prizefight in a Sunday School.

BILLYSUNDAY: 1. A theological jumping-jack, jerked by financial strings.
2. Any one with a pious emotional jag. 3. Hypnosis at so much per. 4. A
person intent on saving his soul by religious rigmarole at the expense
of reason. 5. To paddle away to Paradise in an orthodox canoe, and feel
happy in the thought that most of the folks on the Big Ship are going to
Hell.

BLOOMINGDALE: A condition of mind.

BASTARD: Any man who doubts his own immaculate conception.

BEAN: A dynamic spheroid, combustible under certain conditions.

BLABERINO: Any person who tells a person something a person says about
him, which puts fishbones in the throat and brickbats in the Ostermoor
of the person told.

BOOTY: 1. Whatever belongs to somebody that really belongs to somebody
else, or whatever belongs to somebody else that really belongs to you or
ought to belong to you if it did not belong to a third party--hence,
anything at all. 2. Property in a transitional stage.

BAPTISM: Hydrocephalic abracadabra.

BARD: Anciently a poet; now a Poet-Laureate.

BOREDOM: 1. The essential nature of monogamy. 2. A period or rest
between I Did and I Will. 3. A state of divine revelation wherein for a
single moment we are carried by the giant of Eternal Inutility to the
abysms and summits of the perpetual Nix. (The word _boredom_ comes from
Bore, a tired son of Noah. After the subsidence of the waters, Bore
wandered about the earth, yawning and gaping and stretching, for at that
time malaria oozed from many stagnant pools. Finally, absolutely
exhausted, Bore, being afraid to be down on the damp and slimy soil,
rested on the seventh day on his own bean, hence boredom.)

BUGHOUSE: 1. A condition of mind (See Boston) 2. The place where a
person without funds is sent under certain conditions.

BUSINESS: Looking a payroll in the eye and kiting checks. 2. A method of
reducing a landlady to her lowest terms.

BUSINESSMAN: One who gets the business and completes the
transaction--all the rest are clerks and laborers.

BUTLER: 1. A Person or Thing that has charge of the servants in a house
belonging to another Person or Thing. 2. A tyrant without ears, eyes,
organs, dimensions, passions.

BRAIN: A commodity as scarce as radium and more precious, used to
fertilize ideas.

BOHEMIA: A good place in which to camp, but a very poor place in which
to settle down.

BREAD: A foodstuff which the rich occasionally give to the poor as a
substitute for cake.

CANNIBAL: 1. The conceiver and first practitioner of the eucharistic
rite. 2. A place where a missionary may have a hell of a time. 3. A
Pierrot whose pranks are side-splitting. 4. One who appreciates his
fellow-being at his true worth. 5. The most subtle of living ironists.
6. Any one who takes his brother man at his physical valuation.

CARELESSNESS: 1. To have an eye on Eternity, wherein nothing matters. 2.
To do a thing in the manner of a god who throws dice for the birth or
death of a universe. 3. To perform an act wisely, but not too well.

COURTESY: 1. The court clothes of any two-legged predatory animal. 2.
The oil that makes a juggernaut noiseless.

CHUMS: A condition of sophomorish propinquity that precedes a feud. (See
furse and vendetta.) A state of chumminess between persons of opposite
sex and suitable ages is more or less in the line of Nature. But that
can't-get-along-without-you feeling between persons of the same sex is a
form of hate and means that some third party is going to be beaned.

CIRCUMSTANCE: 1. The fresh banana-peel just around the corner. 2.
_Ex-post-facto_ knowledge of a series of incidents, episodes and laws
which, had we known before doing something that we should not have done
anyhow, we would have done otherwise, in the same way, or not at all. 3.
The Shadowy Iago that follows us up and down life's promenades. 4. Man
Friday to Chance.

CEREBELLUM: 1. The knapsack of Intelligence. 2. The _pons asinorum_
between the mind and the cabeza. 3. A place whence, in democracies,
politicians draw their strength, and in monarchies where the masses
manufacture bombs and guillotines. _E. g._, "Now suppose," began
Professor Sapnoodle, "that a tiny elevator ran up the spine; we should
then call the cerebellum the ceiling of the basement."

CHARITY: 1. A thing that begins at home, and usually stays there. 2.
Bracing up Ralph Waldo Emerson's reputation by attributing to him
literary mousetraps which he should have made, but didn't. (See Cheese.)

CHILDREN: Exquisite caskets of flesh that hold the scrolls of all our
deeds.

CHAUFFEUR: The power behind the thrown.

CHEEK: 1. A drip-pan for tears. 2. Anciently, a part of the face;
latterly, among women, the subsoil of rouge. 3. The principal asset of
Ex-President Bombastes Furioso.

CHEF: The Messiah of gluttons; a Borgia of the scullery; one who
crochets sweetbreads instead of cooking them.

CHALK: A deposit found at the top, bottom and middle and in the space
between the bottom and middle and between the middle and top of American
literature. (Chalk-line, used generally in the phrase, "to walk a
chalk-line"; _E. g._, the shortest way to reach the poor-house is to
walk the chalk-line of probity).

CLIQUE: Friendship gone to seed.

COMMITTEE: A thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in
an hour.

CHRISTIAN: 1. One of a sect that despises and rejects the race from
which its founder sprang. 2. A person who thinks he believes in a
certain creed that he does not believe in, and thus is pied mentally,
morally and arithmetically. 3. A man who keeps one day in the week holy
and raises hell with folks and fauna the other six--sometimes.

CHURCH: A place where the Anointed of the Lord palm themselves off on
one another. 2. A hall of echoes. 3. A counterpane for the dead. 4. An
edifice wherein inspired fogyism gets its final degree.

CHICAGO TONGUE: A lengthening of the unruly member to a hammer-like
proportion.

CONSCIENCE: 1. The muzzle of the will. 2. The Pecksniffian mask of the
fundamental Bill Sykes. 3. The aspiration of Rosinante to be Pegasus.

CHURCH UNITY: Joining my church.

CIGARETTIST: One who is late every morning and fresh every evening.

CITY: 1. Any place where men have builded a jail, a bagnio, a gallows, a
morgue, a church, a hospital, a saloon, and laid out a cemetery--hence a
center of life. 2. A herding region; any part of the earth where
ignorance and stupidity integrate, agglomerate and breed.

CIVILIZATION: A device for increasing human ills; a machine for the
perpetuation of the weak; an ingenious contraption for spreading disease
and hunger. (See war, harlot, politician, liar, Teddy, Sulzer, Murphy,
hypocrisy, newspaper, forger, jail, policemen, lawyer, walking delegate,
capitalist, poverty, clergyman.) _E. g._, "Do you believe in
civilization?" "Yep." From _The Confessions of Herr Krupp_.

COMMONSENSE: The ability to detect values--to know a big thing from a
little one. (I'd rather possess Commonsense than to have six degrees
from Oxford.--_Fingy Conners' Confessions._)

CLOCK: 1. A telltale; a gossip; a blab. 2. A chink through which the
Greta Secret leaks. 3. The Big Ben of eternity.

COFFIN: 1. L'Envoi, the end of the legend. 2. An ornamental candy-box
which no one cares to open. 3. A room without a door or a skylight.

COLLEGE: A place where you have to go in order to find out that there is
nothing in it. (See Marriage.)

COLLEGE DEGREE: A social disgenic, as compared with proof of competence.

COMIC: Tragedy viewed from the wings.

COMPETITION: 1. The struggle for a cake of ice in hell. 2. The life of
trade, and the death of the trader.

CHIMERIC: To follow the right and get left. _E. g._, A. He was chimeric.
B. All the same, he went to the Chair like a man.

CONCOCTION: 1. An imaginative mosaic distinguished from a lie in this,
that a lie is "made up" and a concoction is "put together." 2. A social,
religious, economic or political allegory, dogma, creed or program which
lands some one in power and flattens out those who believe in it. 3. A
mixture of dream and reality, sometimes called "Universe" or "World,"
put together by two strolling Super-Gentlemen Adventurers, sometimes
known as God and Satan.

CONFIDENCE: The one big lesson the world needs most to learn.

CONSERVATIVE: One who is opposed to the things he is in favor of.

COMPLIMENT: A sarcastic remark with a flavor of truth or not, as the
case may be.

CONSOLE: To stab one in pain with the bare bodkin of pity.

CONTRADICTION: 1. Two lies disputing the roadway. 2. A head-on collision
in which two trains of thought telescope each other.

COQUETRY: 1. An eye-shade worn by lubricity. 2. The colored glasses of
The-Thing-Itself. 3. The death-tumbrel that Passion builds for its
dreams.

CONSCIOUSNESS: A state wherein one becomes aware that he is being
robbed, swindled or duped, by either a natural or an artificial law.
Aside from his periods of sleep it may be said that man is always in a
state of consciousness when voting, making love, or when succumbing to
any other form of hypnotic suggestion.

CONVERSION: 1. To be suddenly seized by fright before a fiction or a
fact. 2. To execute a mental and moral pirouette from one absurdity to a
worse one. 3. To exhaust one pleasure and seek redemption in another. 4.
A backslider from your own ideas to those of an inferior.

CO-OPERATION: Doing what I tell you to do, and doing it quick.

COURAGE: 1. A matter of the red corpuscle. 2. A matter of getting used
to it. (It is oxygen that makes every attack, and without oxygen in his
blood to back him, a man attacks nothing--not even a pie.--From Wilbur
Nesbit's book _Bunc as I Have Found It_.)

CREED: A metaphor with ankylosis--a figure of speech frozen stiff with
fright.

CURIOSITY: 1. A gulf that swallows gods, men, creeds, matter, worlds,
philosophies. 2. A peephole in the brain through which one sees the
pomp and ceremony of the Absurd. 3. A monstrous antenna that feels its
way through matter and mind, and founders in the Infinite. 4. At its
lowest, the instinct that boosts us up to peep over our neighbor's
transom, symboled by a knot-hole.

CRITICS: Men who quarrel over the motive of a book that never had any.

CRIMINAL: One who does by illegal means what all the rest of us do
legally.

CROMWELL (OLIVER): The father of Nell Gwynn.

CREDIT: The lifeblood of commerce.

CASTE: A Chinese Wall that deprives you of the society of sensible
people.

CAIN: The first progressive.

CREATOR: A man possessing initiative.

DAWN: 1. The beginning of a daily instalment in a serial story that will
never end. 2. That mystical hour wherein Dives goes belching into
dreamland and Lazarus comes out yawning carrying a dinner-pail.

DEATH: 1. To stop sinning suddenly. 2. To resign one's membership in the
Ananias Club. 3. A readjustment of life's forces.

DEBT: 1. A rope to your foot, cockleburs in your hair, and a clothespin
on your tongue. 2. The devil in disguise.

DEMAGOGUE: One whose highest ambition is to stand on the grave of a
great dead industry and boast to an army of unemployed of his bloody
deeds.

DECALOGUE: 1. The stakes that hold in its place the social circus-tent.
2. A collection of commandments formulated by a person who has broken
them all. 3. An incubator in which eaglets are transformed into capons.
4. A fence that confines animals that can not climb or fly. (The most
famous Decalogue is known as the Ten Commandments. Whoso has obeyed this
Decalogue in toto has died obscure, poor, unsung, unwept, and overlooked
by Clio.)

DOGMA: 1. A hard substance which forms in a soft brain; a coprolitic
idea; a lie imperiously reiterated and authoritatively injected into the
mind of one or more persons who believe they believe what some one else
believes. 2. A paying thought or doctrine. 3. A recession into the
Divine or Imperial--hence, the father of graft.

DEMOCRACY: 1. A form of government by popular ignorance. 2. The dwarf's
paradise. 3. Any political system where male votes are substitutes for
brains. (This word comes from the Abracadabra: "demo," lungs; "crazy,"
to rule; hence, to rule by caloric.)

DENNIS: The man who expresses the things he thinks other folks think he
thinks.

DOLLAR: A disk of metal which has eucharistic qualities; a sacred,
miraculous object, contact with which is looked upon as curative and
prophylactic.

DIARY: 1. To see one's self as no one else cares to see us. 2. A book
that describes the birth, effulgence and disappearance of pimples. 3.
The lavatory of literature.

DIPLOMACY: An endeavor to side-step Nemesis.

DIPLOMAT: A man who says "perhaps" when he means no, as opposed to a
woman who says "perhaps" when she means yes. (A man who says "no" is not
a diplomat, and a woman who says "yes" is not a lady.)

DIGNITY: 1. A state of spiritual, mental or emotional starchiness that
precedes a bluff. 2. A sartorial and tonsorial _chef-d'œuvre_. 3. The
bodily attitude of a speaker or a preacher in the presence of people
whose duty it is to believe he is not lying to them. 4. A mask we wear
to hide our ignorance. (Man has dignity, woman has poise, animals have
power; hence, dignity in a man or woman is anything that is a substitute
for power.)

DISAPPOINTMENT: 1. The cradle of the ideal. 2. The skeleton of Purpose
and the skull and crossbones of Desire. 3. A feeling in regard to the
past that comes to every one on the Thirty-first of each December. 4.
The final issue of any act begun yesterday, today or tomorrow. 5. The
original road to Damascus and Horeb. 6. An alluvium deposited by the
waves of Time in the human soul, and which becomes the basis of
psychological Mont Blancs.

DISCORD: A guinea-hen, a peacock and a bluejay singing a trio.

DISADVANTAGE: Having too many advantages in life.

DEVIL: A god who has been bounced for conduct unbecoming a gentleman.

DOCTOR: 1. A person who has taken seriously the biblical injunction,
"Physician, heel thyself!" 2. In Germany, a swashbuckler person with
many scars, much admired by small boys and unhappily married ladies, and
feared by shopkeepers.

DISINTERESTED: 1. Whatever is inconceivable. 2. A hypothetical ether
that surrounds all forms of selfishness and naturalness. 3. That
psychological interval when we look the other way before making a grab.
4. A monkey's mental attitude toward the hen.

DISHONORABLE: 1. To avoid infamy and almost attain respectability. 2.
The first feeling we entertain toward each new acquaintance. 3. Any
action whatsoever committed by a competitor.

DUTY: A pleasure which we try to make ourselves believe is a hardship.

DIVORCE: 1. A legal separation of two persons of the opposite sex who
desire to respect and honor each other. 2. A marital derail.

DIVORCEE: 1. A female fugitive from injustice. 2. Any lady who is a
Post-Graduate in Love's Correspondence-School.

DISCONTENT: 1. Inertia on a strike. 2. The mainspring of progress. 3.
The starting-point in every man's career.

DISINHERIT: 1. The prankish action of the ghosts in cutting the pockets
out of trousers. 2. To leave great sums of money to lawyers. 3. A method
of insuring postmortem notoriety--and disappointment.

DOUBTER: 1. One who picks his teeth, blows his nose on his napkin, and
yawns at the Lord's table. 2. A good-for-nothing who does not knock
before entering the bathroom of the Faithful.

DREAM: 1. A place where the starving feel the pangs of gluttony, and the
threadbare wear opera-hats and spats. 2. A magic mirror wherein the dead
appear to mock us with their happiness. 3. A cerebral phenomenon caused
on upper Fifth Avenue by eating too much, and on the lower East Side by
eating too little. 4. The Valhalla and the Welsh Rabbit; the Brocken
where the souls of the animals, fish and birds we have eaten hold their
revels; a private theater where indigestion is the prompter.

DUCHESS: The feminine of Dutchman.

DYNAMO: Any man who has everything he eats, drinks, smokes and wears,
charged.

EARTH: 1. A small bean-shaped planet, full of noise, nonsense and
noddies, created in order to swell the pockets of politicians. 2. A
blister produced by the constant abrasion of motion against space.

EAT: 1. To prolong pain; to satisfy the anticipatory pleasure of hunger;
to deliberately plan the contamination of the drinking-water of a
people. 2. The demagogic demands of the belly. 3. A sinful or
extravagant act among the destitute. 4. A sacred rite among the rich. 5.
An artificial aid to conversation and the repetition of threadbare
stories, generally off-color.

EDUCATION: A form of self-delusion by those who muff every good wheeze.

ECONOMICS: The science of the production, distribution and use of
wealth, best understood by college professors on half-rations.

EDITOR: 1. A person employed on a newspaper, whose business it is to
separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
2. A delicate instrument for observing the development and flowering of
the deadly mediocre and encouraging its growth. 3. A seraphic embryon; a
smooth bore; a bit of sandpaper applied to all forms of originality by
the publisher-proprietor; an emictory.

ENEMY: 1. A counter-irritant of which you must get a few, or it's you
for fatty degeneration of the cerebrum. 2. The friend who stings you
into action. 3. Any one who tells the truth about you.

EMPHASIS: To italicize a lie; to lay great stress on certain sounds that
emanate from a larynx and that are intended to hypnotize a tympanum; to
be impressive to the point of almost believing ourselves; the double
chin of a declarative sentence; oratorical moth-balls.

ENNUI: 1. The fourth dimension of action. 2. The looking-glass of the
Infinite. 3. A state of time wherein seconds become days and hours
become years. 4. A shop that contains nothing but a silent salesman,
Death.

EPIGRAM: 1. A vividly expressed truth that is so, or not, as the case
may be. 2. A dash of wit and a jigger of wisdom, flavored with surprise.

ENTHUSIASM: The great hill-climber.

EQUITABLE: An ironical term meaning you can fool some of the people all
the time.

EQUITY: Simply a matter of the length of the judge's ears.

EUCHARIST: Salvation by the pound, or by the pint. (If one should eat,
say, a pound of eucharistic chips and drink two quarts of the holy water
a day, one would be cleansed of all sin and be much richer in bacteria.)

ETERNITY: 1. The Sunday of Time. 2. The sublimest thought of the brain
of Ignorance. 3. A symphony written by a Beethoven of the ineffable _x_
dimension. 4. The North Pole of the hours. 5. Monstrance of the Holy O.
6. A corrosive acid that obliterates Before and Afterward.

EMANCIPATED MAN: One who has dared to think for himself, and thus has
added to his list of enemies.

EVOLUTION: 1. A word that has reclassified in an entertaining manner our
impermeable and eternal ignorance. 2. The growth of a thing from the
simple to the complex, and the wasting away of the complex until it is
simpler than ever. 3. The one superstition that is cordially hated by
theologues.

EVERYBODY: 1. The square root of zero. 2. The leavings of individuality.
3. An agglomeration of bipeds who subsist on one another's shanks. 4.
The Seventh Heaven of stupidity. 5. The cosmos of the pinhead. 6. Nobody
in toto. 7. The collective and organized wisdom of the lowest forms of
animal intelligence.

EXPECTANCY: An exciting interval between rounds.

EXPECTATION: 1. An optimistic feeling about an event that will never
occur. 2. The secret of the persecution of the Jews, Christians and
Mohammedans by one another. 3. The Goddess of Love. Synonyms: Tomorrow,
next week, next year, next century, pretty soon--any imaginary space of
time after the present moment.

EXISTENCE: 1. A metaphysical term which originally meant joy, but which
since the beginning of the Christian era has come to mean pain. 2. To be
(used only in the phrase "to be damned"). 3. Merely to live, without
eating or drinking. (In London, Paris and New York, this phenomenon is
quite common.)

EXPERIENCE: 1. The germ of power. 2. The name every one gives his
mistakes. 3. Stinging and getting stung.

EXPRESSION: 1. That mode of creation by which we coin things out of our
hearts. (Nothing is of any value except that which you create for
yourself, and no joy is joy save as it is the joy of self-expression.)
2. Mind speaking through its highest instrument, Man.

EYE: 1. An organ of the human body which sees the universe as it is not,
and transmits the same to the brain. 2. The soul's feelers and pickers.

EYEBALL: 1. A small, miraculous globe that has the power to fabulize the
external universe. 2. The spectacles of the brain; the peephole of
consciousness.

EPITAPH: 1. Postponed compliments. 2. Postmortem bull-con. 3. Qualifying
for the Ananias Club.

EUROPEAN: An inhabitant of New York City.

EXECUTIVE: A man who can make quick decisions and is sometimes right.

FARMER: 1. A man who raises early feed for potato-bugs. 2. One who
supplies raw stock for vaudeville jokes. 3. A man who makes his money in
the country and blows it in when he comes to town. (Farms were first
devised as an excuse for the Agricultural Department at Washington.)

FAILURE: 1. The man who can tell others what to do and how to do it, but
never does it himself. 2. A man who has blundered, but is not able to
cash in the experience.

FASHION: A barricade behind which men hide their nothingness.

FAME: To have your name paged by the "buttons" of a fashionable hotel.

FAITH: 1. The effort to believe that which your commonsense tells you is
not true. 2. The first requisite in success.

FAKE: An event that occurs every four years in the United States; hence,
by extension, anything popular.

FAMILY LINE: The clothes-line.

FAST TRAIN: One that has no diner.

FEAR: 1. A club used by priests, presidents, kings and policemen to keep
the people from recovering stolen goods. 2. The thought of admitted
inferiority. 3. The rock on which we split.

FEATHERS: Secondary sex advertisements made of fiber and horsetails, and
used on ladies' lids as eye-gougers and such.

FEUD: A fool idea fanned into flame by a fool friend.

FEMINIST MOVEMENT: 1. A hot desire to step on the male tumble-bug. 2. An
uneasy, eccentric, patho-psychio gyration, caused by disappointment or
thwarted ambition. 3. A loose cam or a cosmic monkeywrench in the
convolutions.

FIFTH AVENUE: 1. The widow's chance. 2. A rabbit-warren. 3. The
underworld of the upper world. (Fifth Avenue begins at the Washington
Arch and really ends at Fifty-ninth Street. Above Fifty-ninth Street one
goes into the sacred precincts of monasteries and nunneries. In this
district the inhabitants are divided into two classes: those who barely
live and those who live barely.)

FLY: A sententious, epigrammatic stylist who puts a period after each
utterance.

FOLDEROL: Talk or conversation of any kind between a man and a woman
that does not contain an invitation or a promise.

FORBEARANCE: 1. To forgive an enemy who has been shorn of power. 2. To
buy golden opinions of one's self. 3. To slay with irony or pity.

FORECAST: To observe that which has passed, and guess it will happen
again; to anticipate the future by guessing at the past; to predict that
an event will happen, if it does, by basing calculations on events that
have already happened, if they did. (One may forecast and be right,
wrong, or neither. It depends.)

FIRST REQUISITES: 1. Belief in yourself. 2. Pride in your work. 3.
Useful hands, clear eyes, and a good breath.

FOREHEAD: 1. The facade of a cosmic bagnio. 2. A screen that hides the
obscene. 3. The ramparts of a portable Bastile.

FORTITUDE: That quality of mind which does not care what happens so long
as it does not happen to us.

FORUM: A safety-valve for letting out superfluous air. _E. g._, "Let the
Forum always be open to the people, and let the treasury always be open
to us."--From Titus Livy's _Psychology of the First Contractor_.

FRA: A literary silo that feeds the world.

FRAME-UP: See Brandeisism in the last edition of the _Century
Dictionary_.

FRIENDSHIP: 1. Something that by any other name would be as brittle. 2.
A tacit agreement between two enemies to work together for common swag.
3. The aspiration to boredom. 4. To do unto some one that which you
would not allow him to do unto you.

FRIEND: The masterpiece of Nature.

FRAT: 1. A scheme whereby you lock the world out by shutting yourself
in. 2. A non-productive plan of self-incarceration in a brain bastile by
a mental midge of either sex, or none. 3. A make-believe compact for
purposes of piffle. (See snip-pity, top-lofty, tabascoish,
supercilious.)

GAIETY: 1. An effervescence of spirits produced by the expectation or
the receipt of money. 2. The emotion of a poor person on learning of the
death of a rich relative.

GALLANT: 1. To remember one is a gentleman in spite of one's birth and
training. 2. To give up your seat in a car to a woman, and tread on your
neighbor's foot to get even. 3. To do a perfectly unselfish act from
selfish motives.

GENT: A chauffeur who has a cab-driver for a chum.

GENTLEMAN: One who is gentle toward the friendless.

GLORY: The five senses of the dead.

GENIUS: 1. One who offends his time, his country and his relatives;
hence, any person whose birthday is celebrated throughout the world
about one hundred years after he has been crucified, burned, ostracized
or otherwise put to death. 2. One who stands at both ends of a
perspective; simultaneity of sight; to be one's self plus; to be synonym
and antonym to everything. 3. The ability to act wisely without
precedent--the power to do the right thing for the first time. 4. A
capacity for evading hard work.

GIVETH: The lisping tense of give. _E. g._, "He giveth His beloved
sleep."--From _The Ironic Sayings of Jehovah_.

GOSSIP: 1. Vice enjoyed vicariously--the sweet, subtle satisfaction
without the risk. 2. The lack of a worthy theme.

GLUTTON: A poor man who eats too much, as contradistinguished from a
gourmand, who is a rich man who "lives well."

GOD: 1. The John Doe of philosophy and religion. 2. The first atheist.
3. A puzzle-editor.

GOD AND SATAN: The Pathe Freres of existence.

GODDESS: A Super-Huzzy mated with an apotheosized Super-Thug.

GOOD HABITS: Mentors and servants that regulate your sleep, your work
and your thought.

GOOD SPORT: A man whose soul is equipped with automatic lubrication.

GOOD LUCK: Tenacity of purpose.

GOVERNMENT: A kind of legalized pillage.

GOURMAND: A rich man who eats the surplus production of the world's
foodstuffs that the starving are too niggardly to purchase.

GRAMMAR: The grave of letters.

GRAFT: An agrarian expression first used by Ali Baba.

GUESSWORK: A shallow depression, pit, or cavity in the consciousness of
an editorial writer when he is warning the people.

GREAT MAN: One who perceives the unseen, and knows the obvious.

GUTTER: The Lourdes of the puritanical mind, where it finds what it
seeks.

GROUCHERINO: One whose life is just one dam kick after another.

GRATITUDE: A lively sense of anticipation concerning favors about to be
received.

GUMMA: A substance that forms in the cabeza by an overindulgence in mint
juleps; hence, to become a Super-Brute or a political Has-Been.

GRIEF: 1. The telescope of the emotions that unfolds to your eye the
meaning of all worlds. 2. The overtones in all joy. 3. The pleasure that
lasts the longest. 4. The tears of Memory. 5. The vice of weakness and
the virtue of strength.

HAPPINESS: 1. Something that might have happened yesterday, but which
will never happen tomorrow. 2. A postprandial state of mind, which is
most often a presage of acute gastritis. 3. A loving-cup, the bottom of
which is like a sieve. 4. A mental state compounded of wine, women and
tobacco. 5. The exploitation and final triumph of an instinct in the
individual that society has branded as wicked or dangerous. 6.
Forgetting self in useful effort. 7. A habit--cultivate it.

HABIT: The buffer of our feelings; the armor that protects our
nerve-force; the great economizer of energy.

HEART: An organ in the human body whence comes the impulse to get
divorced.

HAGGIS: The quintessence of all that has been said by all the
Presidents, Governors, and Mayors in the United States since Eighteen
Hundred Eighty-nine.

HAND: 1. A conventionalized bread-hook. 2. An attachment at the end of
the human arm which gives to another a lemon, or something that the
owner of the arm can no longer use or that is harmful to him.

HAIR: The Olympus of the pediculidæ.

HEAVEN: 1. The Coney Island of the Christian imagination. 2. Largely a
matter of digestion. 3. An orphan asylum where institutionalism reigns.
4. A penitential colony where the virtuous and the good are condemned to
eternal fellowship for their stupidities uttered on earth.

HATE: 1. The shoal on which our bark is stranded. 2. A habit.

HAS-BEEN: Any man who thinks he has arrived.

HELL: 1. A Papal bull. 2. An extinct volcano. 3. The Pantheon of the
brave. 4. An ancient conflagration that was checked when Voltaire
invented the asbestos intellect. 5. A theological corn, wart or tumor.
6. The sense of separateness. 7. Three telephone systems in a town. 8.
An invitation to go sightseeing. _E. g._, "If I'd only had a parachute
at the time I would have gone to hell gracefully and taken a record for
descent."--From Lucifer's _Confessions of a Ticket-o'-Leave Man_.

HUSBAND: A booby prize in life's lottery.

HELTA-SKELTA: The new substitute for Strenuosity. Puts you to sleep
while you work. Helta-Skelta is a prepossessing product made from
posthole polyglot piecrust, and is warranted free from teddine, swaboda,
korona, kabo and karezza. Served face to face with cream or without, it
is spit out as soon as chewed, and can not be swallowed. Locate the
lavatory and try a free sample.

HEN: The only animal in Nature that can lay around and make money.

HIGHBROW: 1. A person who has grown so wise that the obvious escapes
him. 2. One who reveres knowledge with superstitious awe, and whose
worship of observation approaches the ecstatic. 3. One who believes that
an atom is a monstrance that conceals the Holy Ghost of Force.

HIGHFLYER: Any man who rides on the running-board, when he might just as
well be inside the limousine.

HISTORY: 1. A collection of epitaphs. 2. Gossip well told.

HOME: 1. A place where we go to change our clothes so as to go somewhere
else. 2. The abode of the heart.

HUMOR: The tabasco sauce that gives life a flavor.

HUMILITY: 1. The slippered patience of the disinherited. 2. The
grogginess of the Ego. 3. To recede to the very bottom of one's own
littleness. 4. The Marseillaise of the disappointed. 5. The odor of
sanctity. 6. An Iago in plush and lavender. 7. Pride getting ready for a
Pounce.

HONEYMOON: 1. A happiness not quite worn out. 2. A postlude to a
wedding-march and a prelude to a funeral ditto. _E. g._, "I did not
drive Adam and Eve out of Eden because they ate my pet pippin, but
because they insisted on carrying on their honeymoon before the modest
animals."--From _The Private Journal of Démiurge_.

HOPE: 1. A substitute for yesterday. 2. A mask that dying persons wear.
3. A system of metaphysics founded by Ananias. Antonyms: Reason,
imagination, experience.

HOUSE: 1. A building with four walls and a roof. 2. A rendezvous for
burglars. 3. A dormitory for servants. 4. The Mecca of bedbugs. (The
difference between a house and a home is this: A house may fall down,
but a home is broken up.)

HUMAN LOVE: The one indestructible thing in Nature.

HUMAN DYNAMO: Any man who gets everything charged.

IDEAL: 1. The dreams of a sin to come. 2. The mirage of failure. 3. The
venom of the lost. 4. An excuse for murder, tyranny or for
self-aggrandizement. 5. Any theory that justifies our secret itch.

IDEALIST: 1. A glassblower. 2. A somnambulist who insists on stepping
out of a solid window into the air. 3. A person who lives in a tower of
porcelain and dines on pumpernickel and lobscouse. 4. A man who fills
his gasoline-tank with attar of roses and expects the motor to run.

INTELLIGENCE: The grand inquisitor that tortures from every truth the
confession that it lies, and from every lie a confession of its divine
necessity.

IDEAL LIFE: Man's normal life, as we shall some day know it.

IF: 1. A tightrope that stretches from But to But. 2. A small, magical,
automatic hinge that can swing the doors of Chance in any direction. 3.
A fatality endowed with free will. 4. The verbal sword of Damocles. 5. A
dizzy precipice at the end of every declarative sentence. 6. A pole
around which the future and the past play hide-and-seek. 7. The vorspiel
to the piker's threnody. _E. g._ (Scene: a narrow bridge.): "Let me
pass, fellow! my name is Must, and I desire to cross." If (standing in
the middle of the bridge): "You damn fool, don't you see I am the end of
the bridge? There is no Must nor Might that can go beyond me."

IMITATION: The sincerest form of insult.

IGNORAMUS: Any man who flatters himself that he is educated.

IMAGINATION: 1. A marvelous little multicolored drugget that covers the
rough and splintered floor of reality. 2. A haunted chateau. 3. A
vestibule between Time and Eternity. 4. The giant enemy of reality. 5.
The red Pantheon of Lucifer. 6. The candle-gleam of science; the
flambeau of the lover; the constellated nebulæ of the poet. 7. The
glittering west-dust of a hidden innominate sun. 8. The seigniory of
untrammeled instincts; the fief of unsanctified dreams; the palfrey that
carries us toward nebulous spiritual hills. 9. The plasma of gods. 10.
Puck strapped to the back of Balaam's ass. 11. The Shakespeare of mental
faculties. 12. The avatar of the emotions. 13. A golden key that unlocks
the bastile of logic. 14. A ladder to the fourth dimension. 15. A
sublime liar. 16. Taking the halter off your thoughts and giving them a
good kick behind. 17. Sympathy illumined by brains.

IMITATOR: A man who succeeds in being an imitation.

IMMORTALITY: 1. A reward given to infidels and atheists by a somewhat
humorous God, for not groveling before Him and annoying Him with
importunities. 2. A system of punishment for suicides, which makes
suicide impossible, thereby putting one over on the ingrate who was
tired of the gift of life, by compelling him to live forever,
willy-nilly. 3. A valueless thing, because unlimited in quantity, which
those hotly intent upon achieving will forfeit through the law which
provides that that for which we clutch we lose. 4. A condition sought by
political officeholders where the incumbent never either dies or
resigns. 5. A state of being encouraged by annuitants, and those who
live in the Garden of Allah-Money. 6. A flimflam offer by a theologian
of inchoate title to improved real estate in the Sky for real estate,
rentals and cash on Earth. 7. A doctrine that the rich teach the poor
for good and sufficient reasons. 8. Divine Compensation for the
starving. 9. A superfluous addition to life; to go on living after one
desires and hopes to remain dead.

INDEPENDENCE: An achievement, not a bequest.

IMPERIALISM: Tyranny, hiding behind the sacred name of Humanity.

INFIDEL: One who defames his Creator and impeaches his own reason by
believing in Orthodox Christianity.

INFIDELITY: To remain faithful to one's self, and to be unfaithful to
some one else's faith. In religion, to think; in the marriage
institution, to fall in love; in business, to do the thing to the other
fellow that the other fellow intends to do to you, and do it first.

ISSUE: In physiology, something that comes up and out; in politics,
something that goes down and in.

INGRATITUDE: 1. A girl who is too busy to acknowledge receipt of a
Christmas present. 2. The portion of the man who has done well; and a
fight with the fox you have warmed into life is imminent.

INFUSORIA: The entire human race with the exception of Homer, Richard
Wagner, Dante, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Rodin, Raphael, Æschylus,
Shakespeare, Schopenhauer and Edward Bok, in whose tremendous skulls we
live and move and have our being, like a whirlwind of germs in the vats
of the Absolute.

INGRATE: Any person who has got something for nothing, and wants more on
the same terms.

INITIATIVE: Doing the right thing without being told.

IRONY: The cactus-plant that sprouts over the tomb of our dead
illusions.

JUDICIOUS: 1. A state of mind wherein things are weighed in an
imponderable scale; a conjunction of two negatives in a void. 2. To be
wanting in foolishness, character or brains. 3. An exquisite and
delicate perception of the difference between two things that are
exactly alike, or the total unlikeness between two things that are
absolutely different. 4. An umbrella to be carried on clear days as well
as on rainy ones, thus protecting the possessor from everything. 5. To
lie flat on your puss while the juggernaut of Opinion goes over you; to
stand perfectly still between two streetcars going in opposite
directions. 6. To see what's coming and avoid it by taking all sides.

JOURNALIST: A newspaperman out of a job.

JURY: 1. The stupidity of one brain multiplied by twelve. 2. A
collection of sedentary owls. 3. The humble apology of Civilization to
Savagery. _E. g._, "Whatever exists may be touched, but a jury is an
exception to this universal law--it must be reached."

JUSTICE: A system of revenge where the State imitates the criminal.

JOHN DOUGH PROCEEDINGS: A hunt for graftheimers.

JUDGE: 1. A man with ankylosis of the ego, who is jealous of the
stenographer for sufficient reasons. 2. One who learns law from lawyers
and is excluded from the game, getting his in honors.

KING: 1. In the presence of genius, a pleb. 2. A vestige. 3. One whose
chief diversion lately has been to watch himself grow beautifully less.
4. A First Cause run to seed. 5. Divine Right tempered by bombs.

KINDERGARTEN: The greatest scheme ever devised--for the education of
parents.

KNOCKING: A slow but sure way of putting the skids under your prospects.
Push in the door softly, and all things are yours--knock and nothing
shall be opened unto you.

KNOWLEDGE: The distilled essence of our intuitions, corroborated by
experience. Knowledge is what I know; wisdom is what I see; theology is
what I guess.

LATER: The Utopia of Postponement; a marvelous door of gold at the end
of every perspective, to which Procrastination holds the keys. The
Concierge of tomorrow. (Some things are done sooner, others are done
now, but most things are done later; hence, manana, dreams and regrets.)

LAUGHTER: 1. The sound you always hear when you chase your hat down the
street. 2. Nature's rest-cure for tired nerves. 3. The solace of the
sad. 4. A facial sunburst that is fatal to the glooms.

LAW: 1. A scheme for protecting the parasite and prolonging the life of
the rogue, averting the natural consequences which would otherwise come
to them. 2. The crystallization of public opinion.

LAWYER: 1. A person who takes this from that, with the result that That
hath not where to lay his head. 2. An unnecessary evil. 3. The only man
in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

LEARN: To add to one's ignorance by extending the knowledge we have of
the things that we can never know.

LIE: The weapon of defense that kind Providence provides for the
protection of the oppressed.

LEVITATION: The creeping up of your trousers when you ride horseback, so
that they supply you a necktie.

LANGUAGE: The tool of the mind.

LIBELOUS: To be tactless in type.

LIAR: 1. One who tells the truth about something that never happened;
hence, a poet, a preacher, a politician, or an Arctic explorer. 2. An
expert witness on the side of the Prosecution, or any witness called by
the Defense. 3. One who reasons far ahead of his time; a seer. (As all
combinations of facts must occur in endless time, the liar, no matter
how absurd his statement, is uttering a truth, because he is stating a
fact that has occurred or will occur at some future date. Thus, a liar,
in the sense of one who utters a falsehood, can not be said, strictly
speaking, to exist. As dirt is merely nectar in the process of evolving,
so a liar is an observer born out of his time. He is the victim of a
divine prank.)

LITERATURE: The art of saying a thing by saying something else just as
good.

LIBERTY: 1. A password in universal use, and hence of no value. 2. The
slogan of a party or sect that seeks to enslave some other party or
sect. 3. The lost latchkey to the Citadel of Power. 4. The sacred
aeroplane of King Ego. 5. The right to go forth unimpeded from any
place, and also to come back. 6. The Northwest Passage to Nowhere. 7.
The thing Patrick Henry asked for when the bartender asked him what he
would have. 8. Only a comparative term. 9. Responsibility--that is why
most men dread it.

LIBRARY: A place where the dead lie.

LOGIC: An instrument used for bolstering a prejudice.

LOAFER: The man who is usually busy keeping some one else from working.

LIFE: 1. An ante-mortem statement; the intrigue of force and matter; the
insomnia of death; a log-jam on the stream of life. 2. The pursuit of
the superfluous. 3. The cupola of a tomb. 4. A game something like Blind
Man's Buff. 5. The paradise of liars. 6. A compromise between Fate and
Freewill. 7. A warfare between the sexes. 8. What you choose to make it.
9. A bank-account with so much divine energy at your disposal. 10. Just
one improper number after another. 11. The interval between the time
your teeth are almost through and you are almost through with your
teeth. 12. An affirmative between two negatives.

LONELY: A peculiar feeling caused by the presence of one or more bores.

LOVERS: Unconscious comedians.

LOVE: The third rail for Life's Empire State Express. The beginning of
all wisdom, all sympathy, all compassion, all art, all religion.

LIVING: A mode of wasting time from the cradle to the grave consecrated
by immemorial usage.

LITIGATION: A form of hell whereby money is transferred from the pockets
of the proletariat to that of lawyers.

MANKIND: 1. A nomadic savage that has wandered over the face of the
earth from East to West in order to reach the East so it could go West
again. It has left many traces of its life--barrooms, brothels, jails,
churches, gallows, best sellers, etc. 2. In the animal kingdom, a
surreptitious and supposititious supererogation. 3. Among the Simians a
place equivalent to our hell. "Oh, you go to Mankind," is quite
frequently heard in the African jungle, even in the best society.

MAHIN: A jumbo of publicity who puts it over.

MENTAL DISSOLUTION: That condition where you are perfectly satisfied
with your religion, education and government.

MAN: 1. A super-simian. 2. Holy dicebox of the devil. 3. God's
scrapbook. 4. Anything allowed to stand at a public bar. 5. A biped with
feathers in his or her hat. 6. A being said to be the highest work of
God--and who admits it. 7. Any creature that creates a Creator in his
own image. 8. A god in the crib.

MAN-HATER: A woman who, finding herself no longer acceptable to man,
flirts with Mephisto.

MARRIAGE: 1. A legal or religious ceremony by which two persons of the
opposite sex solemnly agree to harass and spy on each other for
ninety-nine years, or until death do them join. 2. A way-station, not
the end of the journey. 3. The aspiration of two vowels to be a
diphthong. 4. Love's demitasse.

MAYOR: 1. _Particeps criminis._ 2. The head and front of our offending.
3. Polonius Pecksniff, who plays Bottom for a stipend. 4. A chaste,
honorable, virtuous person whose private life is made inviolable by the
libel laws. 5. A prickly sensation in the back of Folly and Revelry. 6.
The culmination, zenith, equator and pediment of self-sufficient
mediocrity. 7. A crow's-nest from which one may see the perpetually
receding horizons of the Governorship and the Presidency. 8. A chef of
morality. 9. Any person afflicted with primary, secondary or tertiary
holiness. 10. A palm-reader. 11. A nebulous cluster of thought-embryons
resolved into a gaseous state. 12. The nosebag of public decency. 13.
The _alter ego_ of organized cant. 14. The critic of impure reason. 15.
Lobster emeritus. 16. A person who takes an oath to love, honor and obey
Tartuffe.

MANHOLES: The apertures in a peekaboo shirtwaist.

MARTYR: Any man who is willing to sacrifice others for his "cause."

MASTER-MAN: A man who is master of one person--himself.

MASTERSHIP: Industry, concentration, self-confidence.

MATHEMATICS: A tentative agreement that two and two make four.

MATTEAWAN: The antechamber of liberty for a murder-gent.

MILITARISM: A fever for conquest, with Peace for a shield, using music
and brass buttons to dazzle and divert the Populace.

MERCY: 1. The charity of tyrants. 2. The forgiveness of one scoundrel by
another. 3. The culmination of the Will-to-Power and its final
apotheosis. 4. A quality which, like soup, the more it is strained the
less soup and the more water you have. 5. In war a universal mode of
subjugating a people.

MEPHISTO: The fourth person in the Holy Trinity.

MILITANCY: A fixed, fighting mental attitude that will never know when
the war is over.

MIDNIGHT: 1. The Pole of the hours; a pincushion on which sparkle all
the seconds of a day; the keel of the good ship Tomorrow. 2. A chimney
whence the dreams of today issue in smoke.

METAPHYSICS: 1. An attempt to define a thing and by so doing escape the
bother of understanding it. 2. The explanation of a thing by a person
who does not understand it.

MIDDLEMAN: One who works both ends against the middle.

MILLENNIUM: 1. A thousand years beginning with Now and ending with Then.
2. A mythical period when every one will pay his debts and begin
tomorrow again on renewed credit. 3. A religious cycle which has no
visible means of support, even admitting the ideality of time. Hence, by
extension and usage--[Here insert a Mergenthaler pi line of thirty-two
ems.]

MAMMON: The Pope of Protestantism.

MUCKRAKER: One who sits on the fence and defames American enterprise as
it marches by.

MIRACLE: 1. A happening seen by four men at once, but by no one man in
particular--hence, a collective, but otherwise untrue, fact. 2. The
minutiæ of cosmologies. 3. A physical event described by those to whom
it was related by men who did not see it. 4. A portent that precedes the
coming of a Liar with letters patent from Nowhere, or a series of
extraordinary occurrences that attend his comings and goings and
mouthings that in no way equal in majesty, beauty or mystery the
simplest commonplace of his life. (No god, demigod, or other parasite of
human ignorance is complete without miracles, for it is only the natural
and commonplace that are unbelievable.)

MOTHERHOOD: The headliner in God's great vaudeville.

MISSIONARIES: Sincere, self-deceived persons suffering from meddler's
itch.

MISTRESS: 1. A female who has rights, as distinguished from a married
woman, who has duties. 2. One whose respect and love some married men
may hold without the non-transferable license in the bottom of a trunk.

MARTYRDOM: The sweet apotheosis of the things we do not care to avoid.

MINUTE: 1. The crutch on which the Hour leans as it limps into Eternity.
2. A space of time in which we dream of something that will never come
true, or form a resolution that another minute effaces.

MODESTY: 1. A beau-catcher that young ladies wear and women affect. 2.
In a sweetmeat, the souffle through which we dig to reach the plums. 3.
The blush on the face of Desire at the consciousness of its own
immodesty. 4. Among men modesty is the will-to-wait and seize. 5. Venom,
who sidles into corners and shuns the limelight, so that he may the
better see. 6. The attitude of mind that precedes the pounce. 7. The
subtlest symptom of paranoia. 8. Egotism turned wrong side out.

MUMMY: 1. An unobjectionable party whose motives are not questioned. 2.
One who is not in business for his health. 3. Any one who does not
advertise.

MORALITY: 1. The formaldehyde of theology. 2. The line of conduct that
pays.

MORALIST: 1. A beautified eunuch. 2. One self-elected to make the stupid
more stupid. 3. Any one skilled in the science of pornography. 4. A
retired roue. 5. One of the Sacred Legion of Coprolitis.

MORGUE: The pantheon of the unremembered; Death's shop-window.

MUNSEY: 1. Any publisher who does much business on small mental capital.
2. _Verb_: To munsey--to print much and say nothing. 3. A literary
laxative. 4. To put up money for a monkey monarchy.

MURDERER: 1. A savior of society. Synonyms: Soldier, hangman, doctor. 2.
A man born ahead of or after his time.

MUSIC: 1. Anything that has charms to soothe a savage beast. 2.
Unnecessary noises heard in restaurants and cheap hotels. 3. The only
one of the arts that can not be prostituted to a base use. 4. An attempt
to express the emotions that are beyond speech. 5. A noise less
objectionable than any other noise.

MYSTIC: 1. One who guzzles his God. 2. A person who is puzzled before
the obvious, but who understands the non-existent. 3. To stand over the
vasty deep to summon monsters and slip in. 4. Sap that has lost its way.
5. A gymnast who turns flip-flops between the Here and the Not-Here.
(Plato was the first mystic. It was he who announced the discovery of
the Non-Existent. Hegel was the last mystic, for it was he who proved
the Non-Existent was and was not, might have been and never could be,
has was, is now, and never shall be.)

NATURE: 1. The Unseen Intelligence which loved us into being, and is
disposing of us by the same token. 2. That which every one but a
theologian understands, but which no one can define. 3. The Louvre of
the Esthetic Eye; the abattoir of the Religious Eye; the charivari of
the Ironic Eye. 4. The eternal Kishineff of an implacable God.

NANCY: A person of neither sex, who yet combines the bad qualities of
both.

NIGGER: A colored person who has no money.

NEW THOUGHT: Plain, simple commonsense.

NEWSPAPER OFFICE: A figment factory.

NIETZSCHE (FRIEDRICH): A thunder smith.

NEBULOUS TYPOTHETÆ: A bum printer who can never be found when wanted.

NEIGHBOR: The man who knows more about you than you know about yourself.

NOTHING: 1. A negative which is the reality behind every ghostly
affirmative. 2. Something that has density without weight, like a
barber's breath.

NOMINATION: 1. Paradigrammatics, or the art of molding figures in
plaster. 2. The call of the vile. 3. In democracies, the divine
sacrament administered to ignorance. 3. The election, divination and
apotheosis of a paramount parasite.

NEW YORK: The posthumous revenge of the Merchant of Venice.

NESBIT: A plenipotentiary of publicity who takes pretty nothings and
makes of them New York Central literary hash.

OBEDIENCE: 1. Expectation on a monument. 2. A dignified retreat from
Balaklava. 3. Lex Talionis playing 'possum. 4. The second law of Nature,
the first being murder. _E. g._, "After all, it was my brother's
Obedience to the Lord that laid the foundation of my glory."--From
Cain's _Diary of an Altar-Wrecker_.

OPPORTUNITY: 1. The only Knocker that is welcome. 2. Health and a job.

OBLIVION: 1. The memory of Eternity. 2. A place where the human race and
politicians are as one; where immortals are afflicted with aphasia;
where God enjoys a long siesta; where we lose the bores and all those
good folks who want to tell us the sad story of their lives.

OLD MAID: A lady of uncertain age and uneasy virtue.

OPERA: 1. Forerunner of the phonograph. 2. A rendezvous for the bored.

OPTIMISM: 1. The instinct to lie. 2. Fatty degeneration of intelligence.
3. A philosophical system that attempts to demonstrate the existence of
a pre-established Stupidity. 4. To believe that disease, dirt,
earthquakes, fires, wars, politicians, blindness, and burial alive,
celebrate and enhance the Glory of God. 5. To whistle while passing a
cemetery in the night; to sing a hymn while having a tooth pulled; to
smile while being robbed. 6. A tipple invented by Leigh Mitchell Hodges,
the basis of which is clams and prune juice. 7. A kind of heart
stimulant--the digitalis of failure.

ORTHODOXY: 1. In religion, that state of mind which congratulates itself
on being absolutely right, and a belief that all who think otherwise are
wholly wrong. 2. A faith in the fixed--a worship of the static. 3. The
joy that comes from thinking that most everybody is lined up for Limbus
with no return ticket. 4. A condition brought about by the sprites of
Humor, according to the rule that whom the gods would destroy they first
make mad. 5. The zenith of selfishness and the nadir of egotism. 6.
Mephisto with a lily in his hand. 7. A corpse that does not know it is
dead. 8. Spiritual constipation. 9. That peculiar condition where the
patient can neither eliminate an old idea or absorb a new one.

ORGANIZED RELIGION: Antique philosophy, or the rule of the priest.

OBSTINACY: 1. To stick to your favorite lie or truth because you know
you are wrong in either case. 2. The ego's peacock-plumes.

OPTIMIST: 1. A neurotic person with gooseflesh, and teeth a-chatter,
trying hard to be brave. 2. A man who when he falls in the soup thinks
of himself as being in the swim. 3. A man who does not care what
happens, so long as it doesn't happen to him.

ORATORY: 1. Chin-music with Prince Albert accompaniment. 2. The lullaby
of the Intellect. 3. Palaver in a Prince Albert.

ORIENT: 1. The subconscious part of the Occident. 2. The cradle of all
infamies and all wisdom. 3. A place where God and the house have an
esoteric meaning.

PAIN: 1. The sacred, immanent music of the Cosmos written in slow triple
time. 2. A form of salvation invented by Christianity. 3. A beautiful
and ecstatic state wherein one comes to a realization of the benevolence
of the Almighty.

PARADISE: 1. A place where one is permitted to continue one's vices,
excesses and inanities for an eternity. 2. A postmortem rake-off. 3. Any
place from which one can see a friend in Hell. 4. One good telephone
system. (Christians, Mohammedans and Billysundays have promised
themselves a cheerful time after death; this they call _Paradise_. The
Jews are the only people who have no Paradise beyond the tomb; this is
easily explained when it is remembered that they own New York.)

PARODY: A calico cat stuffed with cotton.

PARVENU: One who has risen suddenly from nothing and becomes nothing
suddenly.

PEACE: A monotonous interval between fights.

PEDANT: A person with more education than he can use.

PERFORMER: One who has a right to do troglodyte stunts and who can do
something else.

PERFUME: Any smell that is used to down a worse one.

PHILOSOPHY: Our highest conception of life, its duties and its
destinies.

POLITICIANS: 1. Men who volunteer the task of governing us for a
consideration. 2. See Graftheimer.

PERICLES: See Aspasia.

PESSIMIST: 1. One who has been intimately acquainted with an Optimist.
2. The official vinegar-taster to Setebos.

PIETY: 1. The tinfoil of pretense. 2. That feeling of reverence we have
toward the Almighty on account of His supposed resemblance to ourselves.

PUBLISHER: 1. An emunctory business, first functioned by Barabbas. 2.
One of a band of panders which sprang into existence soon after the
death of Gutenberg and which now overruns the world. 3. The patron saint
of the mediocre.

POET: 1. A person born with the instinct to poverty. 2. One whose ideas
of the beautiful and the sublime get him in jail or Potter's Field. 3.
The patron saint of landlords. 4. A worthless, shiftless chap whose
songs adorn the libraries of fat shopkeepers and paunchy Philistines one
hundred years after the chap has died of malnutrition. 5. A dope-fiend.

POETRY: 1. A substitute for the impossible. 2. The bill and coo of sex.

PLATONIC LOVE: The only kind that is blind. It never knows where it is
going to fetch up.

PLANET: A planet is a large body of matter entirely surrounded by a
void, as distinguished from a clergyman, who is a large void entirely
surrounded by matter.

PLAY: A wise method of Nature which prevents one's nerves from setting
on the outside of his Stein-Bloch.

POCKET: The seat of the human soul.

POLICE: Similia similibus.

POLICY: Leaving a few things unsaid.

POLITENESS: 1. The screen of language; the irony of civility; a
fishing-rod. 2. A substitute for war. 3. To wipe your feet carefully on
the common doormat before letting yourself in another's premises with a
skeleton key. 4. Caliban in a boiled shirt, tuxedo and spats.
(Politeness in the animal world is known after eating only; in the human
world it is known both before and after eating, and, in a certain
restricted circle, during eating.)

PRAYER: A supplication intended for the person who prays. Only very dull
people doubt its efficacy.

PRIG: A person with more money than he needs.

PREACHER: 1. Mendicancy in a celluloid collar. 2. A man who advises
others concerning things about which he knows nothing. 3. Any man who
lives on six hundred dollars a year and only works orally. 4. (Now
obsolete) One who makes pastoral calls, frightens the young, astonishes
the old, bothers the busy, and serves disappointed females as vicarious
lover, father, friend, and personal representative of Deity.

PRACTICAL POLITICS: The glad hand, and a swift kick in the pants.

PRINCIPLE: 1. Bait. 2. A formula for doing a thing that, unformulated,
would land the doer in jail. (Must not be confused with the word
_principal_. Both words are used correctly in the following sentence:
One may live one's life without principle, but not without principal.
Or, again, Principle is sometimes principal; but principal has no
principle. Or, The principal was never paid on principle.)

PROSECUTOR: 1. One who abets a crime after it has or has not been
committed. 2. An oratorical censor that precedes the coming of the
hangman. 3. A pumice-stone that gives to the Statue of Justice a
cleanly, Christian look. 4. A nose that can sniff the gallows, long
before the wood is cut for it in the forest.

POSTPONEMENT: The father of failure.

PRISON: 1. A place where any lady may have a baby without fearing
society. 2. An institution where even crooks go wrong. 3. The House of a
Thousand Tears. 4. The last resort of the obscure to achieve fame. 5. A
banker's mess-hall. 6. A place where men go to take the vow of chastity,
poverty and obedience. 7. An example of a Socialist's Paradise, where
equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is
eliminated.

PROTESTANTISM: 1. A splinter from the cross of Christ. 2. Acrobatic
theologic mugwumpery. 3. Any one of fifty-seven varieties of hate. 4.
Sects which have taken the petticoats off of the saints and put them on
their pastors.

PROGRESS: Getting free from theology, and substituting psychology
instead.

PROGRESSIVE: 1. A politician who wears his opinions pompadour. 2. An
obstructionist who grows fat on conservatism and conversation. 3. A
reactionary to whom movement and motion are necessary in order to keep
warm, and secure gulps and guzzles. 4. A hungry or unsuccessful person;
hence, an explosive, quixotic fellow with empty pockets and a shallow
pate. 5. One who has felt the slings and arrows of outrageous success
that has come to others. 6. A political piker, who will not play the
game according to the rules which he himself devised. 7. One who would
recall all decisions that do not uphold his claims. 8. A man who steals
a label, and clapping it on himself, thinks that he is It. 9. A plan for
going forward by backing up to mob rule. (The first Progressive of whom
we know was Judas. The next was Ananias. Lazarus was a Progressive, and
had he married the Queen of Sheba he would have changed places with
Dives. _E. g._, "This age belongs to the Progressives."--From Kazook's
_Confessions of a Popular Lick-Spittle_.)

PURGATORY: Two telephone systems in one town.

PROSPERITY: 1. That peculiar condition which excites the lively interest
of the ambulance-chaser. 2. That which comes about when men believe in
other men. 3. That condition which attracts the lively interest of
lawyers, and warrants your being sued for damages or indicted, or both.

POLYGAMY: An endeavor to get more out of life than there is in it.

PSYCHOLOGY: The science of human minds and their relationship one to
another.

PUBLIC OPINION: The judgment of the incapable many opposed to that of
the discerning few.

PUNISHMENT: 1. The justice that the guilty deal out to those who are
caught. 2. A perpetual fine, imposed hourly during the lifetime of a
human being for his temerity in living, and continued in Heaven or Hell
for his temerity in dying. 3. Among the poor and lowly, a service due
the State for disobeying the mandates of the rich and powerful; among
the rich, a slight reaction from overeating. (There are three kinds of
punishment: the punishment of God, the punishment of man, and the
punishment of living in Buffalo.)

POPULARITY: The triumph of the commonplace.

PROPHETS: The advance couriers of Time.

PURITY: 1. A rapt, interested and ecstatic aloofness toward natural
processes. 2. A sewerage system that carries off everything, leaving the
soul perfectly bald. 3. A condition of the mind that causes one to snoop
around in garbage-dumps and start a league. 4. A plan of teaching things
to children in which they are not interested. 5. An ethereal nose giving
the miraculous power of sensing the lavatory in the Elysian Fields
before it smells the flowers. (There is purity of mind, purity of body
and purity of speech. Any one person endowed with all three of these
modes or purity is blessed, elect, saved, or otherwise atrophied and
pickled.)

PHARISEE: A man with more religion than he knows what to do with.

PHILISTINE: A term of reproach used by prigs to designate certain people
they do not like.

PHILOSOPHER: One who thinks in order to believe; one who formulates his
prejudices and systematizes his ignorance.

ROYCROFT: 1. _Roy_ means "king"; and _croft_ means "home or craft."
Thus, Roycroft means King-Craft; working for the highest; doing your
work just as good as you can--making things for the King. 2. The dignity
and the divinity of labor--peace, reciprocity, health, industry,
persistency and endurance.

RELAXATION: The first requirement of strength.

RECIPROCITY: 1. The act of seconding the emotion. 2. A widow teaching a
clergyman how to tango, in return for his kindness in having shown her
how to swim.

RACE PROBLEM: Picking the winner.

RECIPE: 1. Work, smile, study, play, love--Mix. 2. Concentrate,
Consecrate, Work.

REDEEMER: 1. A man who died that grafters might live. 2. An Oriental who
would have forgiven Hiram Johnson. 3. The founder of a great trust, with
headquarters in the Vatican. 4. Any one who consorts with the
underworld, but who spends his vacation after death in the upper world.
5. In the Catholic Church the Man Higher Up, to whom the Pope plays Jack
Rose. 6. One who saved the whole world, but who had himself damned for
his pains. _E. g._, First Citizen: "Christ was a myth." Second Citizen:
"He was not!" (Then they murder each other in His Name.)

REASON: The arithmetic of the emotions.

RELIGION: Philosophy touched with emotion.

RAILROADS: The most important factor for progress and enlightenment in
the world today.

RENUNCIATION: The act of giving up your seat in a street-car to a pretty
woman, and then purposely stepping on an old man's toes.

REFORMER: 1. One who causes the rich to band themselves against the
poor. 2. One who educates the people to appreciate the things they need.

REGION: A specific, definite space, as distinguished from any other
specific, definite space; as, East Aurora, Barren Island, Kalamazoo, Sea
Grit, Beverly.

REPARTEE: Any remark which is so clever that it makes the listener wish
he had said it himself.

RESIGNATION: 1. A truce with ourselves in order to give us time to bury
our living. 2. Pride walling itself up. 3. To keep shop without a
show-window. 4. To go to sleep in the lap of the inevitable. 5. A
covered walk to the interior of ourselves; a subway to some other form
of trespass; a peephole into the enemy's fortress. 6. To play possum
when one hears the footfall of Fate on the stairs.

REPUTATION: A bubble which a man bursts when he tries to blow it for
himself.

RESURRECTION: The hypothetical New-Year's Day in the calendar of the
dead.

REMORSE: That feeling which we all have when the thing fails to work,
and the world knows it. The form that failure takes when it has made a
grab and got nothing.

RESPECTABILITY: The dickey on the bosom of civilization.

ROMANCE: Where the hero begins by deceiving himself and ends by
deceiving others.

RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION: 1. Hate that scorches like hell, but which the
possessor thinks proves he is right. 2. Your own wrath as opposed to the
shocking bad temper of others.

RIGHTEOUSNESS: 1. Only a form of commonsense. 2. Wise expediency.

REVIVAL: Religion with a vaudeville attachment.

ROOSEVELT (THEODORE): A harangue-outang.

RUINS: 1. The hope of the ancient yesterday. 2. Absolute proof that the
world of dreams, like the planet earth, is round. (Ruins are chiefly
notable for the number of enlightened liars, called archeologists, they
produce.)

SACRILEGE: 1. Any impolite act in the presence of a Humbug. 2. To shock
the sensibilities of a Nobody. 3. To kill a mystical Mule or swap jokes
in public with a Ghost.

SACRED SOIL: That which is well tilled.

SAINT: 1. Generally speaking, a person who retires into the wilderness
of the spirit in order to coddle a ruling weakness. 2. To become polite
toward God and His universe. 3. A steeplejack on miraged minarets.

SAINTSHIP: The exclusive possession of those who have either worn out or
never had the capacity to sin.

SANITY: The ability to do team-work.

SALOON: The poor man's club; run with intent to make the poor man
poorer.

SAVAGES: Men who like to go to war.

SANATORIUM: The place where a man is sent who has money, as opposed to
"Bughouse," meaning the place where a man is sent who has no
bank-balance.

SATIRIST: 1. A taxidermist of the Past, Present and Future; one who
disembowels, stuffs and mounts all the gods, living and dead; one who
fills up with straw and sawdust all illusions. 2. An esoteric mimic. 3.
A being with an eye in the back of his head. 4. A postlude to the day's
funeral march; a prelude to freedom.

SCANDAL: Gossip related by a small-bore.

SALVATION: Redemption from a belief in miracles.

SCHOLAR: 1. An ornate fossil. 2. A deadly ptomain that infests all forms
of dynamic thought. 3. An impenetrable mass of matter that contains
within itself the principle of unchangeability. 4. A turtle on whose
shell is carved certain hieroglyphic lettering; such as, Ph. D., M. D.,
LL. D. 5. A medieval owl that roosts in universities, especially those
that are endowed. 6. A plaster-of-Paris convolute. 7. A man, long on
advice but short on action, who thinks he thinks. 8. One who draws his
breath and salary. 9. Anybody with a bulging brow and no visible means
of support.

SELF-RELIANCE: The name we give to the egotism of the man who succeeds.

SCHOOL: A training-place--mental, physical, moral. Good boys are boys at
work. Bad boys are good boys who misdirect their energies.

SCIENCE: 1. The knowledge of the common people classified and carried
one step further. 2. Accurate organized knowledge founded on fact. 3.
Classified superstition.

SECRET: 1. A thing we give to others to keep for us. 2. Something known
only to a few.

SEER: The scout of civilization.

SELF-CONTROL: The ability to restrain a laugh at the wrong place.

SILENCE: A trick of the human gullet that conceals weakness or
emptiness.

SHEENY: A Jew who has more money than you have.

SHOAL: Shallow, literary, theological. (By extension, Columbia, Harvard,
Yale and some other universities are sometimes called shoal-marks.)

SINCERITY: 1. A mental attitude acquired after long practise by man, in
order to conceal his ulterior motives. 2. To be childish, to be senile.
3. To lack invention, imagination or character. (A sincere man is one
who bluffs only a part of the time.)

SIN: Perverted power. The man without capacity for sin has no ability to
do good--isn't that so? His soul is a Dead Sea that supports neither
ameba nor fish, neither noxious bacilli nor useful life.

SERVILITY: 1. The instinct of superiority in its lowest form. 2. The
politician's virtue. 3. A means of getting on. 4. A natural law, the
violation of which makes one famous and poor.

SHERMAN ACT: A scheme to entrap men who set large numbers of people to
work at employment profitable to everybody concerned.

SOBER: 1. To be bored, unhappy, "all in." 2. To be born or live in
Philadelphia. 3. To be without money, to be destitute. 4. To die. _E.
g._, "Thank God, I am sober at last!" Dying words of Potodorus in _Two
Gentlemen of Yonkers_.

SCOTCH: A verb meaning with care.

SELF-PROTECTION: The first law of life.

SOCIALIST: 1. A person easily peeved. 2. In economics, a school of
thought founded by Cain. 3. A man who, so far as he himself is
concerned, considers a thing done when he has suggested it.

SMACK: A crude, rude, vulgar and unsatisfactory substitute for a kiss.

SOCIETY: 1. An erotic clique that reads _Vogue_, _Smart Set_ and _Town
Topics_. 2. A congregation of people who are not persons. 3. A vast
interchange of service through labor, ideas and commodities. 4. A relish
for solitude.

SOCIALISM: 1. A sincere, sentimental, beneficent theory, which has but
one objection, and that is, it will not work. 2. A plan by which the
inefficient, irresponsible, ineffective, unemployable and unworthy will
thrive without industry, persistence or economy. 3. An earnest effort to
get Nature to change the rules for the benefit of those who are tired of
the Game. 4. A social and economic scheme of government by which man
shall loiter rather than labor. 5. A survival of the unfit. 6. A device
for swimming without going near the _H_{2}O._. 7. Participation in
profits without responsibility as to deficits. 8. An arrangement for
destroying initiative, invention, creation and originality. 9.
Resolutions passed by a committee as a substitute for work. 10. A
sentiment which encouraged and evolved would lead to revolution, with
dynamiting and destruction as a prominent and recognized part of its
propaganda. 11. A system for turning water into wine, kerosene into
oyster-soup, and boulders into bread, by passing resolutions.

SOCIOLOGY: The religious application of economics.

SORROW: The magical palette upon which Life mixes her colors.

SLAVE: A person with a servile mind, who quickly crooks the pregnant
hinges of the knee, that thrift may follow fawning; who gratifies his
wants either through cringing flattery or coercion, and who tyrannizes
over others whenever he has a chance.

SPECIALIST: 1. One who limits himself to his chosen mode of ignorance,
and gets further into a bog than the man ahead of him. 2. A kind of
hypnotic trance wherein a person by centering his gaze on a given object
renders the object smaller in proportion as his illusion grows.

SOREHEAD: A politician who has reached for something that was not his,
and missed.

SOLITUDE: The only thing that can hold the balance true.

SORCERER: 1. Any one who can make the people of the United States
believe they rule. 2. A juggler (hence the founder of any religious,
political or philosophical system).

SPECIOUS: That form of argument used as an indoor sport by East Aurora
natives in an attempt to prove that two or three make four.

SORCERY: The art of charming money out of the pockets of those who do
not desire to part with it.

SPINSTERHOOD: An achievement, not a disgrace.

STALL STUFF: 1. Things said to see what the other person will say. 2.
The language used by politicians. 3. All conversation between spoons.
_Example_: Seeing Mr. Jones leave his office, you enter and ask his
stenographer this question: "Is Mr. Jones in?" (See Piffle, Pink Tea,
Four o'Clock.)

STAR: 1. A milestone in the Infinite. 2. A malicious, ironic eye. 3. A
device to show man his insignificance.

STARVATION: 1. The originator of thought. 2. A way to salvation. 3. A
physical eccentricity of the stomach. 4. A cure for indigestion. 5. A
banting process invented by Lazarus.

SPECIALIZATION: The ability to focus all your energies on one thing.

STUDIO: 1. A place where a model is borne to blush unseen, and contract
pneumonia in the chilly air. 2. A rendezvous of would-bes, has-beens and
never-wazzers. 3. A place to study the esoteric. 4. The most polite term
you can apply to it.

STUPIDITY: 1. The Utopia of the wise, the Lethe forbidden to the lips of
genius. 2. The driving power of a Mass in motion. 3. An incurable state
of somnambulism with which mankind is blessed, and under the spell of
which it performs the most fantastic actions, such as marriage,
balloting, warring, preaching, selling, buying, baptizing. 4. The
_leit-motif_ of the Vaudeville called Progressiveness.

SUPERSTITION: 1. Scrambled science flavored with fear. 2. Ossified
metaphor.

SURGERY: An adjunct, more or less valuable to the diagnostician.

STYLE: 1. The brogue of the mind. 2. A certain manner or deportment
which emanates from those who have neither manner nor deportment. 3. A
peculiar and individual manner of doing the unnecessary.

SUBSIDIARY: A competitor who has come off his perch through threats or
bribes, or both.

SUCCESS: 1. A sunset by Turner. 2. A stained-glass window through which
one may see an ironic moon. 3. The final link in a chain of chalk. 4. To
rise from the illusion of pursuit to the disillusion of possession. 5.
An inability to further fletcherize. 6. Giving up the fight, being
possessed of the fallacy that you have won. 7. Death's lullaby. 8. The
accomplishment of one's best. 9. To write your name high upon the
outhouse of a country tavern. 10. A constant sense of discontent, broken
by brief periods of satisfaction on doing some specially good piece of
work. 11. A matter of outliving your sins. 12. A subtle connivance of
Nature for bringing about a man's defeat. 13. The realization of the
estimate which you place upon yourself. 14. Voltage under
control--keeping one hand on the transformer of your Kosmic Kilowatts.
15. A matter of the red corpuscle. 16. The thing that spoils many a good
failure. 17. Something that is hideous to all but its victims.

SUCTION: An automatic, murderous and perpetual movement of Society
against each individual.

SUPERNATURAL: The natural not yet understood.

SUN: 1. A giant spot-light, which from the wings of space plays
intermittently upon a meaningless ten-twenty-thirty vaudeville show. 2.
The root of all evil, the mother of all beauty, and the final tomb of
all that is good, bad or indifferent. 3. A dyehouse, probably the first.
(The sun was once worshiped as a divinity, but later the competition
between gods and divinities became so strenuous that the sun was
forgotten, hence his casual earthquakes, floods and other little
reminders that we and our gods are only his gimcracks.)

STATUTE: The proof, record and final justification of the infallibility
of Ignorance.

STRONG MAN: One who busies himself with the useful tasks that others can
not, or will not do, and allows those who can do nothing else to do the
easy things.

SYMPATHY: 1. A malady that sometimes afflicts the rich. 2. The lees of
the wine-cup offered to another. 3. An impulse toward ourselves through
the heart of another. 4. Whatever may be extended to another that does
not take the shape of money. 5. The sum of all virtues. 6. The first
attribute of love as well as its last. (I am not sure but that sympathy
is love's own self, vitalized mayhap by some divine actinic ray. Only
the souls who have suffered are well loved.)

TEACHER: 1. A person, either male or female, who instils into the head
of another person, either voluntarily or for pay, the sum and substance
of his or her ignorance. 2. One who makes two ideas grow where only one
grew before.

TALK: To open and close the mouth rapidly while the bellows in the
throat pumps out the gas in the brain.

TAFTIAN: Any man who is too cowardly to fight, and too fat to run.

TEMPTATION: A desire to do something you know you should not do.

THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY: A place where young men are taught to silence the
questions of the ignorant.

TEMPLE: A place other than a bed, where one takes one's shoes off.
(There are Jewish temples, pagan temples and money temples, but no
Christian temples: the latter has no need of them, because Christian
religion is the only one in the world in which its believers and
followers practise exactly what its Founder taught. Each Christian may
point to himself and say proudly, "Ecce Temple," hence, etc., etc.,
etc.)

THE PHILISTINE: A publication that puts the Syracuse Product on the
terminal feathers of the Idea Bird.

THE-SCENE-CHANGES: A device invented by a writer who was running short
of Cosmic Gasoline.

TOMORROW: The mother of regret.

THANKSGIVING: 1. A mass said for the repose of the living. 2. Gratitude
in the presence of the death of some one else. 3. The irony of fatality.
4. The instinctive and perpetual atavism of the Will-to-Live.
(Thanksgiving-Day in the United States is a national holiday on which
all the people who during the past year have survived earthquake, fire,
housemaid's knee and death, overeat and thus thank God for His
favoritism.)

TIGHTWADITY: A disease in which one dollar obstructs the vision to the
exclusion of a higher denomination.

TOLERANCE: An agreement to tolerate intolerance.

TODAY: The hearse that carries the dreams of yesterday to the cemetery.

THE: An article, aristocratic by birth and breeding, but which
degenerates into an adjective in the sentence, "He is THE man of the
hour."

THEOLOGY: 1. A hideous juggernaut to whose wheels cling the blood and
bone and the flattened flesh of a million dead emotions. 2. Not what we
know about God, but what we do not know about Nature. 3. Obsolete
psychology, or the arbitrary rule of a Theos or god. 4. An engine
planned for the purpose of bewildering humanity. 5. Self-deceived
egotism, hiding behind the name of Deity. 6. Antique and obsolete
philosophy. 7. The science of a non-existent, all-powerful, all-wise and
all-loving nix.

THINKER: 1. One who destroys philosophies. 2. One who can make others
think.

THOUGHT: 1. Something made up of the thoughts you, yourself, think. The
other kind is supplied to you by jobbers. 2. Mental dynamite.

TIME: 1. The press-agent of genius. 2. An eternal guest that banquets on
our ideals and bodies. 3. In the theater of the gods a moving-picture
film that reproduces the cosmic comedy. 4. A metaphysical entity that
made the Ingersoll watch a physical possibility. 5. A loafer playing at
tenpins. 6. An illusion--to orators. 7. The solvent and the dissolver of
all. (Time was anciently symbolized by Kronos; today it is symbolized by
the mystical syllables, So-Much-Per. The word has also undergone strange
etymological changes. Anciently, time was singular, but since the advent
of the Unions, we have "time and a third," "double time," etc.)

TOMB: A place for the deposit of the dead. (See College, Newspaper
Office, Philadelphia Club, Legation, etc.)

TOP-NOTCHER: An individual who works only for the interest of the
institution of which he is a part, not against it.

TOTAL DEPRAVITY: The greatest idea for the acquisition of power and pelf
ever devised.

TROUBLE: 1. A hallucination that affords a sweet satisfaction to the
possessor. 2. Any interesting topic of conversation. 3. A plan of Nature
whereby a person is diverted from the humiliation of seeing himself as
others see him. (An impressario's troubles begin when the prima donna
kicks and the ladies of the ballet won't.)

TRUMPET: A musical instrument which in the mouth of Gabriel will bring
to life for their eternal undoing all Shylocks, officeholders, editorial
writers, landlords, and professional epigrammatists.

TITLE: 1. A Pantheon of royal ciphers. 2. Anything superimposed on a
superfluity.

TRUTH: 1. A universal error. 2. A relation between one illusion (the
outer world) and another (the inner world). 3. A prejudice raised to an
axiom. 4. Something that a few will die for. 5. That which serves us
best in expressing our lives. (A rotting log is truth to a bed of
violets; while sand is truth to a cactus.) 6. Anything which happened,
might have happened, or which will possibly happen. 7. The opinion that
still survives. 8. An imaginary line dividing error into two parts.

TRADITION: 1. Salvation through ossification; redemption through
folklore; a fetter for the foolish. 2. A clock that tells what time it
was. 3. A method of holding the many back while some man does the thing
which they declare is impossible.

UNIVERSITY: 1. An institution for the prevention of learning. 2. A place
where rich men send their sons who have no aptitude for business. 3. A
plan for the elimination of physical culture and the exaltation of
athletics. 4. A literary, gonococci culture-bed. 5. A collection of
buildings which emit the odor of the classics and omit the odor of
sanctity. 6. A place wherein the youthful mind is taught the danger of
thinking.

UNION LABOR: A force which unchecked would develop into violent and
destructive anarchy.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Miss District de Columbia and her forty-eight
Subsidiaries.

UNREQUITED: (Used generally with the word love.) Inability to make both
ends meet.

UTOPIAN: A person who demands that you shall live up to his ideals.

UNPARDONABLE SIN: Neglecting to close the screen-door.

UP TO DATE: To be far behind the Ancients, who were generally ahead of
the current date. _E. g._, "This thing would never have happened if I
had only been up to date, but I tried to be dateless."--Last words of
Socrates.

UTOPIA: A place where you have but to suggest a thing, to consider it
done; a condition where all things are supplied on slipping a wish into
a slot.

USAGE: The consecration in time of something that was originally
absurd.

VICIOUS: 1. To be natural. 2. To give up lying. (A word taken from the
Zynrxi, and first used by the French at the Siege of Paris to describe
the Germans; hence, any one who does anything impolite or acts in any
way strictly in accordance with his innate tastes.)

VENOM: 1. The juice of hate. 2. The sap of reformers, moralists and
socialists. 3. The deadly smile of the optimist when he looks at the
under dog. 4. The physical sweat of a defeated candidate and the
emotional sweat of old maids. (Venom, like everything else, is subject
to the law of evolution and variation. Between the venom of Cain and the
venom of Tolstoy, several million instances could be quoted to prove the
universality and beneficence of this breedy instinct.)

VICTORY: A matter of staying-power.

VACILLATION: The prominent feature of weakness of character.

VAUDEVILLE: A matter of verve, nerve and vermilion.

VERACITY: The appendix vermiformis of the human character; a quaint
atavistic instinct. (Veracity was once quite common in the childhood of
the race; but as herding became more and more complex and human
relations became more and more interjangled, there came into being a
species of bipeds known as doctors, lawyers, politicians, editorial
writers and preachers. Coeval with their birth the instinct to veracity
weakened perceptibly until it reached the condition of nixus nihilus ni
in which we hold it today.)

VACATION: A period of increased and pleasurable activity when your wife
is at the seashore.

VIVISECTION: Blood-lust, screened behind the sacred name of Science.

VILE: 1. Anything that serves; whatever is useful. 2. Something done or
thought by some one else.

VINDICATION: The subtlest form of irony.

WADSWORTH: 1. A fabled people, whose remains are found in the Genesee
Valley, who chased an anise-seed bag around the steamheat and pretended
to be bored by existence. 2. Any one with more buzz-fuzz than brains.

WARRIOR: 1. A soldier de luxe. 2. A successful, patriotic thug who has
been dead fifty years or more. 3. A fearless person who gains renown by
the number of alcoholic drinks he has taken in a day and by the variety
and virulence of the venereal diseases he has contracted. 4. A myth, a
fable, a lie.

WAVES: The thoughts of the sea, which, like human wave-thoughts, roll
on, roll back, roll up and spray the void.

WEALTH: A cunning device of Fate whereby men are made captive, and
burdened with responsibilities from which only Death can file their
fetters.

WIFE: 1. In good society, a publicity agent who advertises her husband's
financial status through conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure. 2.
In the submerged tenth, a punching-bag and something handy for batting
up flies. 3. A man's mental mate, and therefore his competitor in the
race for power. 4. The other half of the sphere. (This view is usually
regarded as a vagary, and any one holding it is apt to be pointed out as
strange, peculiar, erratic and unsafe.)

WINE: An infallible antidote to commonsense and seriousness; an excuse
for deeds otherwise unforgivable.

WISDOM: A term Pride uses when talking of Necessity.

WISE MAN: One who sees the storm coming before the clouds appear.

WIT: The thing that fractures many a friendship.

WOMAN: 1. The First Cause. 2. A being created for the purpose of voting.
3. Any one with an allowance that is occasionally paid, but which can't
be collected. 4. A pet, a plaything, a scullion, a thing to die for, or
a thing to kill. 5. A being to get rid of or to secure--to run away
from, or with, as the case may be. 6. Among the Ancients, a slave, a
chattel; among the Moderns, a financial swashbuckler. Synonyms: sphinx,
devil, angel, liar, spendthrift.

WAR: The sure result of the existence of armed men.

WE: The smear of life against the radiant _x_.

WHISKY: The Devil's right bower.

WORDS: The airy, fairy humming-birds of the imagination.

WORDSWORTH (WILLIAM): The only Lilliputian that slipped under the canvas
into Olympus.

WORK: 1. That which keeps us out of trouble. 2. A plan of God to
circumvent the Devil.

WORMS: 1. The final word in criticism. 2. At the last analysis.

WORRY: Ironic nurse to old bedridden Dame Care. _E. g._, "I should
worry"--famous saying of the Infinite Nix at twelve o'clock Saturday
night of the Sixth Day as he threw down his tools and sent the Earth
about its business.

YESTERDAY: 1. One evil less and one memory more. 2. A short-change
artist, from whom we can never recover. 3. A period of time that has
always existed, in contradistinction to a period of time called tomorrow
that can never exist. 4. A mirror wherein if we look long enough we will
see ourselves as others could never possibly see us. 5. The Eden of the
sentimental. (Time is divided into yesterday, today and tomorrow, which
are but three varieties of the same metaphysical tetter. In the
beginning was the Infinite, and the Infinite begat Time, and Time begat
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.)

YOUR DUTY: The things you have to do, and not a damn tap more. The other
man's duty is the thing you think he should do.

YOURS: Anything which up to the present time the bunch has not been able
to get away from you.

ZODIAC: 1. The wallpaper of the heavens. 2. The mirrors of the
nothingness of Man and the sublimity of the nothingness of Space.

ZEAL: The feeling you have before you secure the thing, as compared with
"Stung," which is your condition after you have captured it.

ZONE: The region immediately surrounding a Limburger Cheese.

ZERO: A round figure often referred to by Doctor Cook in his diary, and
which his enemies tried to make symbolic of himself.

ZIGZAG: The route followed by poets in arriving at truth, as opposed to
the direct course which they take for the buffet.

ZEUS: A grouchy old god who was so reduced in estate that he posed as a
model for Greek artists.

ZEPHYR: A ladylike blizzard.

ZEITGEIST: The things that everybody believes, but that nobody
understands.

Transcriber's Notes:

Italics indicated _like this_

Small caps indicated LIKE THIS.

Each word definition was surrounded by small bullet shaped decorations.

Each letter group definition list and each page was surrounded by
page-width decorations.

The definitions are not in alphabetical order in the original.

Corrections made to text:

Definition of agriculturist: duplicate "in" removed.

Definition of chums: right parenthesis supplied at end of second
sentence.

Definition of consciousness: extraneous right parenthesis removed.

Definition of decalogue: "animiles" corrected to "animals".

Definition of diplomat: "man" corrected to "woman".

Definition of house: comma at end of sentence two changed to period.

Definition of oratory: 4 changed to 3.

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Roycroft Dictionary - Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days." ***

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