THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

The Devil’s Dictionary was begun in a weekly paper in 1881, and was
continued in a desultory way at long intervals until 1906. In that year a
large part of it was published in covers with the title The Cynic’s
Word Book, a name which the author had not the power to reject or
happiness to approve. To quote the publishers of the present work:

“This more reverent title had previously been forced upon him by the
religious scruples of the last newspaper in which a part of the work had
appeared, with the natural consequence that when it came out in covers the
country already had been flooded by its imitators with a score of ‘cynic’
books—The Cynic’s This, The Cynic’s That, and The
Cynic’s t’Other. Most of these books were merely stupid, though some
of them added the distinction of silliness. Among them, they brought the
word ‘cynic’ into disfavor so deep that any book bearing it was
discredited in advance of publication.”

Meantime, too, some of the enterprising humorists of the country had
helped themselves to such parts of the work as served their needs, and
many of its definitions, anecdotes, phrases and so forth, had become more
or less current in popular speech. This explanation is made, not with any
pride of priority in trifles, but in simple denial of possible charges of
plagiarism, which is no trifle. In merely resuming his own the author
hopes to be held guiltless by those to whom the work is addressed—enlightened
souls who prefer dry wines to sweet, sense to sentiment, wit to humor and
clean English to slang.

A conspicuous, and it is hoped not unpleasant, feature of the book is its
abundant illustrative quotations from eminent poets, chief of whom is that
learned and ingenious cleric, Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J., whose lines
bear his initials. To Father Jape’s kindly encouragement and assistance
the author of the prose text is greatly indebted.

A.B.

A

ABASEMENT, n. A decent and customary mental attitude in the presence of
wealth or power. Peculiarly appropriate in an employee when addressing an
employer.

ABATIS, n. Rubbish in front of a fort, to prevent the rubbish outside from
molesting the rubbish inside.

ABDICATION, n. An act whereby a sovereign attests his sense of the high
temperature of the throne.

G.J.

ABDOMEN, n. The temple of the god Stomach, in whose worship, with
sacrificial rights, all true men engage. From women this ancient faith
commands but a stammering assent. They sometimes minister at the altar in
a half-hearted and ineffective way, but true reverence for the one deity
that men really adore they know not. If woman had a free hand in the
world’s marketing the race would become graminivorous.

ABILITY, n. The natural equipment to accomplish some small part of the
meaner ambitions distinguishing able men from dead ones. In the last
analysis ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of
solemnity. Perhaps, however, this impressive quality is rightly appraised;
it is no easy task to be solemn.

ABNORMAL, adj. Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and
conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be
detested. Wherefore the lexicographer adviseth a striving toward the
straiter resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself.
Whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and the
hope of Hell.

ABORIGINIES, n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a
newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.

ABRACADABRA.

Jamrach Holobom

ABRIDGE, v.t. To shorten.

Oliver Cromwell

ABRUPT, adj. Sudden, without ceremony, like the arrival of a cannon- shot
and the departure of the soldier whose interests are most affected by it.
Dr. Samuel Johnson beautifully said of another author’s ideas that they
were “concatenated without abruption.”

ABSCOND, v.i. To “move in a mysterious way,” commonly with the property of
another.

Phela Orm

ABSENT, adj. Peculiarly exposed to the tooth of detraction; vilifed;
hopelessly in the wrong; superseded in the consideration and affection of
another.

Jogo Tyree

ABSENTEE, n. A person with an income who has had the forethought to remove
himself from the sphere of exaction.

ABSOLUTE, adj. Independent, irresponsible. An absolute monarchy is one in
which the sovereign does as he pleases so long as he pleases the
assassins. Not many absolute monarchies are left, most of them having been
replaced by limited monarchies, where the sovereign’s power for evil (and
for good) is greatly curtailed, and by republics, which are governed by
chance.

ABSTAINER, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying
himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything
but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

G.J.

ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own
opinion.

ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.

ACADEMY, n. [from ACADEME] A modern school where football is taught.

ACCIDENT, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable
natural laws.

ACCOMPLICE, n. One associated with another in a crime, having guilty
knowledge and complicity, as an attorney who defends a criminal, knowing
him guilty. This view of the attorney’s position in the matter has not
hitherto commanded the assent of attorneys, no one having offered them a
fee for assenting.

ACCORD, n. Harmony.

ACCORDION, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.

ACCOUNTABILITY, n. The mother of caution.

Joram Tate

ACCUSE, v.t. To affirm another’s guilt or unworth; most commonly as a
justification of ourselves for having wronged him.

ACEPHALOUS, adj. In the surprising condition of the Crusader who absently
pulled at his forelock some hours after a Saracen scimitar had,
unconsciously to him, passed through his neck, as related by de Joinville.

ACHIEVEMENT, n. The death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.

ACKNOWLEDGE, v.t. To confess. Acknowledgement of one another’s faults is
the highest duty imposed by our love of truth.

ACQUAINTANCE, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not
well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its
object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous.

ACTUALLY, adv. Perhaps; possibly.

ADAGE, n. Boned wisdom for weak teeth.

ADAMANT, n. A mineral frequently found beneath a corset. Soluble in
solicitate of gold.

ADDER, n. A species of snake. So called from its habit of adding funeral
outlays to the other expenses of living.

ADHERENT, n. A follower who has not yet obtained all that he expects to
get.

ADMINISTRATION, n. An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to
receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president. A man of
straw, proof against bad-egging and dead-catting.

ADMIRAL, n. That part of a war-ship which does the talking while the
figure-head does the thinking.

ADMIRATION, n. Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to
ourselves.

ADMONITION, n. Gentle reproof, as with a meat-axe. Friendly warning.

Judibras

ADORE, v.t. To venerate expectantly.

ADVICE, n. The smallest current coin.

Jebel Jocordy

AFFIANCED, pp. Fitted with an ankle-ring for the ball-and-chain.

AFFLICTION, n. An acclimatizing process preparing the soul for another and
bitter world.

AFRICAN, n. A nigger that votes our way.

AGE, n. That period of life in which we compound for the vices that we
still cherish by reviling those that we have no longer the enterprise to
commit.

AGITATOR, n. A statesman who shakes the fruit trees of his neighbors
—to dislodge the worms.

AIM, n.

G.J.

AIR, n. A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the
fattening of the poor.

ALDERMAN, n. An ingenious criminal who covers his secret thieving with a
pretence of open marauding.

ALIEN, n. An American sovereign in his probationary state.

ALLAH, n. The Mahometan Supreme Being, as distinguished from the
Christian, Jewish, and so forth.

Junker Barlow

ALLEGIANCE, n.

G.J.

ALLIANCE, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have
their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pockets that they cannot
separately plunder a third.

ALLIGATOR, n. The crocodile of America, superior in every detail to the
crocodile of the effete monarchies of the Old World. Herodotus says the
Indus is, with one exception, the only river that produces crocodiles, but
they appear to have gone West and grown up with the other rivers. From the
notches on his back the alligator is called a sawrian.

ALONE, adj. In bad company.

Booley Fito

ALTAR, n. The place whereupon the priest formerly raveled out the small
intestine of the sacrificial victim for purposes of divination and cooked
its flesh for the gods. The word is now seldom used, except with reference
to the sacrifice of their liberty and peace by a male and a female tool.

M.P. Nopput

AMBIDEXTROUS, adj. Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a
left.

AMBITION, n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while
living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.

AMNESTY, n. The state’s magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be
too expensive to punish.

ANOINT, v.t. To grease a king or other great functionary already
sufficiently slippery.

Judibras

ANTIPATHY, n. The sentiment inspired by one’s friend’s friend.

APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom.

“The Mad Philosopher,” 1697

APOLOGIZE, v.i. To lay the foundation for a future offence.

APOSTATE, n. A leech who, having penetrated the shell of a turtle only to
find that the creature has long been dead, deems it expedient to form a
new attachment to a fresh turtle.

APOTHECARY, n. The physician’s accomplice, undertaker’s benefactor and
grave worm’s provider.

G.J.

APPEAL, v.t. In law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.

APPETITE, n. An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a
solution to the labor question.

APPLAUSE, n. The echo of a platitude.

APRIL FOOL, n. The March fool with another month added to his folly.

ARCHBISHOP, n. An ecclesiastical dignitary one point holier than a bishop.

Jodo Rem

ARCHITECT, n. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of
your money.

ARDOR, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.

ARENA, n. In politics, an imaginary rat-pit in which the statesman
wrestles with his record.

ARISTOCRACY, n. Government by the best men. (In this sense the word is
obsolete; so is that kind of government.) Fellows that wear downy hats and
clean shirts—guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.

ARMOR, n. The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.

ARRAYED, pp. Drawn up and given an orderly disposition, as a rioter hanged
to a lamppost.

ARREST, v.t. Formally to detain one accused of unusualness.

The Unauthorized Version

ARSENIC, n. A kind of cosmetic greatly affected by the ladies, whom it
greatly affects in turn.

Joel Huck

ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related as follows by
the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.

ARTLESSNESS, n. A certain engaging quality to which women attain by long
study and severe practice upon the admiring male, who is pleased to fancy
it resembles the candid simplicity of his young.

ASPERSE, v.t. Maliciously to ascribe to another vicious actions which one
has not had the temptation and opportunity to commit.

ASS, n. A public singer with a good voice but no ear. In Virginia City,
Nevada, he is called the Washoe Canary, in Dakota, the Senator, and
everywhere the Donkey. The animal is widely and variously celebrated in
the literature, art and religion of every age and country; no other so
engages and fires the human imagination as this noble vertebrate. Indeed,
it is doubted by some (Ramasilus, lib. II., De Clem., and C.
Stantatus, De Temperamente) if it is not a god; and as such we know
it was worshiped by the Etruscans, and, if we may believe Macrobious, by
the Cupasians also. Of the only two animals admitted into the Mahometan
Paradise along with the souls of men, the ass that carried Balaam is one,
the dog of the Seven Sleepers the other. This is no small distinction.
From what has been written about this beast might be compiled a library of
great splendor and magnitude, rivalling that of the Shakespearean cult,
and that which clusters about the Bible. It may be said, generally, that
all literature is more or less Asinine.

G.J.

AUCTIONEER, n. The man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked a
pocket with his tongue.

AUSTRALIA, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and
commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate
dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.

AVERNUS, n. The lake by which the ancients entered the infernal regions.
The fact that access to the infernal regions was obtained by a lake is
believed by the learned Marcus Ansello Scrutator to have suggested the
Christian rite of baptism by immersion. This, however, has been shown by
Lactantius to be an error.

Jehal Dai Lupe

B

BAAL, n. An old deity formerly much worshiped under various names. As Baal
he was popular with the Phoenicians; as Belus or Bel he had the honor to
be served by the priest Berosus, who wrote the famous account of the
Deluge; as Babel he had a tower partly erected to his glory on the Plain
of Shinar. From Babel comes our English word “babble.” Under whatever name
worshiped, Baal is the Sun-god. As Beelzebub he is the god of flies, which
are begotten of the sun’s rays on the stagnant water. In Physicia Baal is
still worshiped as Bolus, and as Belly he is adored and served with
abundant sacrifice by the priests of Guttledom.

BABE or BABY, n. A misshapen creature of no particular age, sex, or
condition, chiefly remarkable for the violence of the sympathies and
antipathies it excites in others, itself without sentiment or emotion.
There have been famous babes; for example, little Moses, from whose
adventure in the bulrushes the Egyptian hierophants of seven centuries
before doubtless derived their idle tale of the child Osiris being
preserved on a floating lotus leaf.

Ro Amil

BACCHUS, n. A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for
getting drunk.

Jorace

BACK, n. That part of your friend which it is your privilege to
contemplate in your adversity.

BACKBITE, v.t. To speak of a man as you find him when he can’t find you.

BAIT, n. A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind
is beauty.

BAPTISM, n. A sacred rite of such efficacy that he who finds himself in
heaven without having undergone it will be unhappy forever. It is
performed with water in two ways—by immersion, or plunging, and by
aspersion, or sprinkling.

G.J.

BAROMETER, n. An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather
we are having.

BARRACK, n. A house in which soldiers enjoy a portion of that of which it
is their business to deprive others.

BASILISK, n. The cockatrice. A sort of serpent hatched from the egg of a
cock. The basilisk had a bad eye, and its glance was fatal. Many infidels
deny this creature’s existence, but Semprello Aurator saw and handled one
that had been blinded by lightning as a punishment for having fatally
gazed on a lady of rank whom Jupiter loved. Juno afterward restored the
reptile’s sight and hid it in a cave. Nothing is so well attested by the
ancients as the existence of the basilisk, but the cocks have stopped
laying.

BASTINADO, n. The act of walking on wood without exertion.

BATH, n. A kind of mystic ceremony substituted for religious worship, with
what spiritual efficacy has not been determined.

Richard Gwow

BATTLE, n. A method of untying with the teeth of a political knot that
would not yield to the tongue.

BEARD, n. The hair that is commonly cut off by those who justly execrate
the absurd Chinese custom of shaving the head.

BEAUTY, n. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a
husband.

BEFRIEND, v.t. To make an ingrate.

BEG, v. To ask for something with an earnestness proportioned to the
belief that it will not be given.

Atka Mip

BEGGAR, n. One who has relied on the assistance of his friends.

BEHAVIOR, n. Conduct, as determined, not by principle, but by breeding.
The word seems to be somewhat loosely used in Dr. Jamrach Holobom’s
translation of the following lines from the Dies Irae:

BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A
striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

BENEDICTINES, n. An order of monks otherwise known as black friars.

“The Devil on Earth” (London, 1712)

BENEFACTOR, n. One who makes heavy purchases of ingratitude, without,
however, materially affecting the price, which is still within the means
of all.

BERENICE’S HAIR, n. A constellation (Coma Berenices) named in honor
of one who sacrificed her hair to save her husband.

G.J.

BIGAMY, n. A mistake in taste for which the wisdom of the future will
adjudge a punishment called trigamy.

BIGOT, n. One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that
you do not entertain.

BILLINGSGATE, n. The invective of an opponent.

BIRTH, n. The first and direst of all disasters. As to the nature of it
there appears to be no uniformity. Castor and Pollux were born from the
egg. Pallas came out of a skull. Galatea was once a block of stone.
Peresilis, who wrote in the tenth century, avers that he grew up out of
the ground where a priest had spilled holy water. It is known that
Arimaxus was derived from a hole in the earth, made by a stroke of
lightning. Leucomedon was the son of a cavern in Mount Aetna, and I have
myself seen a man come out of a wine cellar.

BLACKGUARD, n. A man whose qualities, prepared for display like a box of
berries in a market—the fine ones on top—have been opened on
the wrong side. An inverted gentleman.

BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters—the most difficult kind
of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by
those who cannot acceptably write any kind.

BODY-SNATCHER, n. A robber of grave-worms. One who supplies the young
physicians with that with which the old physicians have supplied the
undertaker. The hyena.

Bettel K. Jhones

BONDSMAN, n. A fool who, having property of his own, undertakes to become
responsible for that entrusted to another to a third.

Philippe of Orleans wishing to appoint one of his favorites, a dissolute
nobleman, to a high office, asked him what security he would be able to
give. “I need no bondsmen,” he replied, “for I can give you my word of
honor.” “And pray what may be the value of that?” inquired the amused
Regent. “Monsieur, it is worth its weight in gold.”

BORE, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

BOTANY, n. The science of vegetables—those that are not good to eat,
as well as those that are. It deals largely with their flowers, which are
commonly badly designed, inartistic in color, and ill-smelling.

BOTTLE-NOSED, adj. Having a nose created in the image of its maker.

BOUNDARY, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two
nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights
of the other.

BOUNTY, n. The liberality of one who has much, in permitting one who has
nothing to get all that he can.

Henry Ward Beecher

BRAHMA, n. He who created the Hindoos, who are preserved by Vishnu and
destroyed by Siva—a rather neater division of labor than is found
among the deities of some other nations. The Abracadabranese, for example,
are created by Sin, maintained by Theft and destroyed by Folly. The
priests of Brahma, like those of Abracadabranese, are holy and learned men
who are never naughty.

Polydore Smith

BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think what we think. That which
distinguishes the man who is content to be something from the man
who wishes to do something. A man of great wealth, or one who has
been pitchforked into high station, has commonly such a headful of brain
that his neighbors cannot keep their hats on. In our civilization, and
under our republican form of government, brain is so highly honored that
it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

BRANDY, n. A cordial composed of one part thunder-and-lightning, one part
remorse, two parts bloody murder, one part death-hell-and-the grave and
four parts clarified Satan. Dose, a headful all the time. Brandy is said
by Dr. Johnson to be the drink of heroes. Only a hero will venture to
drink it.

BRIDE, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

BRUTE, n. See HUSBAND.

C

CAABA, n. A large stone presented by the archangel Gabriel to the
patriarch Abraham, and preserved at Mecca. The patriarch had perhaps asked
the archangel for bread.

CABBAGE, n. A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as
a man’s head.

The cabbage is so called from Cabagius, a prince who on ascending the
throne issued a decree appointing a High Council of Empire consisting of
the members of his predecessor’s Ministry and the cabbages in the royal
garden. When any of his Majesty’s measures of state policy miscarried
conspicuously it was gravely announced that several members of the High
Council had been beheaded, and his murmuring subjects were appeased.

CALAMITY, n. A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the
affairs of this life are not of our own ordering. Calamities are of two
kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.

CALLOUS, adj. Gifted with great fortitude to bear the evils afflicting
another.

When Zeno was told that one of his enemies was no more he was observed to
be deeply moved. “What!” said one of his disciples, “you weep at the death
of an enemy?” “Ah, ’tis true,” replied the great Stoic; “but you should
see me smile at the death of a friend.”

CALUMNUS, n. A graduate of the School for Scandal.

CAMEL, n. A quadruped (the Splaypes humpidorsus) of great value to
the show business. There are two kinds of camels—the camel proper
and the camel improper. It is the latter that is always exhibited.

CANNIBAL, n. A gastronome of the old school who preserves the simple
tastes and adheres to the natural diet of the pre-pork period.

CANNON, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national
boundaries.

CANONICALS, n. The motley worn by Jesters of the Court of Heaven.

CAPITAL, n. The seat of misgovernment. That which provides the fire, the
pot, the dinner, the table and the knife and fork for the anarchist; the
part of the repast that himself supplies is the disgrace before meat. Capital
Punishment, a penalty regarding the justice and expediency of which
many worthy persons—including all the assassins—entertain
grave misgivings.

CARMELITE, n. A mendicant friar of the order of Mount Carmel.

G.J.

CARNIVOROUS, adj. Addicted to the cruelty of devouring the timorous
vegetarian, his heirs and assigns.

CARTESIAN, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the
celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum—whereby he was pleased to
suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might
be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum— “I
think that I think, therefore I think that I am;” as close an approach to
certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

CAT, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked
when things go wrong in the domestic circle.

Elevenson

CAVILER, n. A critic of our own work.

CEMETERY, n. An isolated suburban spot where mourners match lies, poets
write at a target and stone-cutters spell for a wager. The inscriptions
following will serve to illustrate the success attained in these Olympian
games:

Thomas M. and Mary Frazer

CENTAUR, n. One of a race of persons who lived before the division of
labor had been carried to such a pitch of differentiation, and who
followed the primitive economic maxim, “Every man his own horse.” The best
of the lot was Chiron, who to the wisdom and virtues of the horse added
the fleetness of man. The scripture story of the head of John the Baptist
on a charger shows that pagan myths have somewhat sophisticated sacred
history.

CERBERUS, n. The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the
entrance—against whom or what does not clearly appear; everybody,
sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the
entrance. Cerberus is known to have had three heads, and some of the poets
have credited him with as many as a hundred. Professor Graybill, whose
clerky erudition and profound knowledge of Greek give his opinion great
weight, has averaged all the estimates, and makes the number twenty-seven—a
judgment that would be entirely conclusive if Professor Graybill had known
(a) something about dogs, and (b) something about arithmetic.

CHILDHOOD, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of
infancy and the folly of youth—two removes from the sin of manhood
and three from the remorse of age.

CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely
inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One
who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent
with a life of sin.

G.J.

CIRCUS, n. A place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see
men, women and children acting the fool.

CLAIRVOYANT, n. A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing
that which is invisible to her patron, namely, that he is a blockhead.

CLARIONET, n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in
his ears. There are two instruments that are worse than a clarionet—two
clarionets.

CLERGYMAN, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs
as a method of bettering his temporal ones.

CLIO, n. One of the nine Muses. Clio’s function was to preside over
history—which she did with great dignity, many of the prominent
citizens of Athens occupying seats on the platform, the meetings being
addressed by Messrs. Xenophon, Herodotus and other popular speakers.

CLOCK, n. A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for
the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him.

Purzil Crofe

CLOSE-FISTED, adj. Unduly desirous of keeping that which many meritorious
persons wish to obtain.

Anita M. Bobe

COENOBITE, n. A man who piously shuts himself up to meditate upon the sin
of wickedness; and to keep it fresh in his mind joins a brotherhood of
awful examples.

Quincy Giles

COMFORT, n. A state of mind produced by contemplation of a neighbor’s
uneasiness.

COMMENDATION, n. The tribute that we pay to achievements that resembles,
but do not equal, our own.

COMMERCE, n. A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of
C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money belonging to E.

COMMONWEALTH, n. An administrative entity operated by an incalculable
multitude of political parasites, logically active but fortuitously
efficient.

K.Q.

COMPROMISE, n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each
adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to
have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.

COMPULSION, n. The eloquence of power.

CONDOLE, v.i. To show that bereavement is a smaller evil than sympathy.

CONFIDANT, CONFIDANTE, n. One entrusted by A with the secrets of B,
confided by him to C.

CONGRATULATION, n. The civility of envy.

CONGRESS, n. A body of men who meet to repeal laws.

CONNOISSEUR, n. A specialist who knows everything about something and
nothing about anything else.

An old wine-bibber having been smashed in a railway collision, some wine
was poured on his lips to revive him. “Pauillac, 1873,” he murmured and
died.

CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as
distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

CONSOLATION, n. The knowledge that a better man is more unfortunate than
yourself.

CONSUL, n. In American politics, a person who having failed to secure an
office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition
that he leave the country.

CONSULT, v.i. To seek another’s disapproval of a course already decided
on.

CONTEMPT, n. The feeling of a prudent man for an enemy who is too
formidable safely to be opposed.

CONTROVERSY, n. A battle in which spittle or ink replaces the injurious
cannon-ball and the inconsiderate bayonet.

Conmore Apel Brune

CONVENT, n. A place of retirement for woman who wish for leisure to
meditate upon the vice of idleness.

CONVERSATION, n. A fair for the display of the minor mental commodities,
each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to
observe those of his neighbor.

CORONATION, n. The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and
visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite
bomb.

CORPORAL, n. A man who occupies the lowest rung of the military ladder.

Giacomo Smith

CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit
without individual responsibility.

CORSAIR, n. A politician of the seas.

COURT FOOL, n. The plaintiff.

COWARD, n. One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.

CRAYFISH, n. A small crustacean very much resembling the lobster, but less
indigestible.

Sir James Merivale

CREDITOR, n. One of a tribe of savages dwelling beyond the Financial
Straits and dreaded for their desolating incursions.

CREMONA, n. A high-priced violin made in Connecticut.

CRITIC, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries
to please him.

Orrin Goof

CROSS, n. An ancient religious symbol erroneously supposed to owe its
significance to the most solemn event in the history of Christianity, but
really antedating it by thousands of years. By many it has been believed
to be identical with the crux ansata of the ancient phallic
worship, but it has been traced even beyond all that we know of that, to
the rites of primitive peoples. We have to-day the White Cross as a symbol
of chastity, and the Red Cross as a badge of benevolent neutrality in war.
Having in mind the former, the reverend Father Gassalasca Jape smites the
lyre to the effect following:

CUI BONO? [Latin] What good would that do me?

CUNNING, n. The faculty that distinguishes a weak animal or person from a
strong one. It brings its possessor much mental satisfaction and great
material adversity. An Italian proverb says: “The furrier gets the skins
of more foxes than asses.”

CUPID, n. The so-called god of love. This bastard creation of a barbarous
fancy was no doubt inflicted upon mythology for the sins of its deities.
Of all unbeautiful and inappropriate conceptions this is the most
reasonless and offensive. The notion of symbolizing sexual love by a
semisexless babe, and comparing the pains of passion to the wounds of an
arrow—of introducing this pudgy homunculus into art grossly to
materialize the subtle spirit and suggestion of the work— this is
eminently worthy of the age that, giving it birth, laid it on the doorstep
of prosperity.

CURIOSITY, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to
know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most
active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.

CURSE, v.t. Energetically to belabor with a verbal slap-stick. This is an
operation which in literature, particularly in the drama, is commonly
fatal to the victim. Nevertheless, the liability to a cursing is a risk
that cuts but a small figure in fixing the rates of life insurance.

CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as
they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a
cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.

D

DAMN, v. A word formerly much used by the Paphlagonians, the meaning of
which is lost. By the learned Dr. Dolabelly Gak it is believed to have
been a term of satisfaction, implying the highest possible degree of
mental tranquillity. Professor Groke, on the contrary, thinks it expressed
an emotion of tumultuous delight, because it so frequently occurs in
combination with the word jod or god, meaning “joy.” It
would be with great diffidence that I should advance an opinion
conflicting with that of either of these formidable authorities.

DANCE, v.i. To leap about to the sound of tittering music, preferably with
arms about your neighbor’s wife or daughter. There are many kinds of
dances, but all those requiring the participation of the two sexes have
two characteristics in common: they are conspicuously innocent, and warmly
loved by the vicious.

DANGER, n.

Ambat Delaso

DARING, n. One of the most conspicuous qualities of a man in security.

DATARY, n. A high ecclesiastic official of the Roman Catholic Church,
whose important function is to brand the Pope’s bulls with the words Datum
Romae. He enjoys a princely revenue and the friendship of God.

DAWN, n. The time when men of reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer to
rise at about that time, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty
stomach, and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to
these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the
truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but
in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing
is that it has killed all the others who have tried it.

DAY, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent. This period is
divided into two parts, the day proper and the night, or day improper—the
former devoted to sins of business, the latter consecrated to the other
sort. These two kinds of social activity overlap.

DEAD, adj.

Squatol Johnes

DEBAUCHEE, n. One who has so earnestly pursued pleasure that he has had
the misfortune to overtake it.

DEBT, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the
slave-driver.

Barlow S. Vode

DECALOGUE, n. A series of commandments, ten in number—just enough to
permit an intelligent selection for observance, but not enough to
embarrass the choice. Following is the revised edition of the Decalogue,
calculated for this meridian.

G.J.

DECIDE, v.i. To succumb to the preponderance of one set of influences over
another set.

G.J.

DEFAME, v.t. To lie about another. To tell the truth about another.

DEFENCELESS, adj. Unable to attack.

DEGENERATE, adj. Less conspicuously admirable than one’s ancestors. The
contemporaries of Homer were striking examples of degeneracy; it required
ten of them to raise a rock or a riot that one of the heroes of the Trojan
war could have raised with ease. Homer never tires of sneering at “men who
live in these degenerate days,” which is perhaps why they suffered him to
beg his bread—a marked instance of returning good for evil, by the
way, for if they had forbidden him he would certainly have starved.

DEGRADATION, n. One of the stages of moral and social progress from
private station to political preferment.

DEINOTHERIUM, n. An extinct pachyderm that flourished when the Pterodactyl
was in fashion. The latter was a native of Ireland, its name being
pronounced Terry Dactyl or Peter O’Dactyl, as the man pronouncing it may
chance to have heard it spoken or seen it printed.

DEJEUNER, n. The breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously
pronounced.

DELEGATION, n. In American politics, an article of merchandise that comes
in sets.

DELIBERATION, n. The act of examining one’s bread to determine which side
it is buttered on.

DELUGE, n. A notable first experiment in baptism which washed away the
sins (and sinners) of the world.

DELUSION, n. The father of a most respectable family, comprising
Enthusiasm, Affection, Self-denial, Faith, Hope, Charity and many other
goodly sons and daughters.

Mumfrey Mappel

DENTIST, n. A prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls
coins out of your pocket.

DEPENDENT, adj. Reliant upon another’s generosity for the support which
you are not in a position to exact from his fears.

DEPUTY, n. A male relative of an office-holder, or of his bondsman. The
deputy is commonly a beautiful young man, with a red necktie and an
intricate system of cobwebs extending from his nose to his desk. When
accidentally struck by the janitor’s broom, he gives off a cloud of dust.

Jamrach Holobom

DESTINY, n. A tyrant’s authority for crime and fool’s excuse for failure.

DIAGNOSIS, n. A physician’s forecast of the disease by the patient’s pulse
and purse.

DIAPHRAGM, n. A muscular partition separating disorders of the chest from
disorders of the bowels.

DIARY, n. A daily record of that part of one’s life, which he can relate
to himself without blushing.

“The Mad Philosopher”

DICTATOR, n. The chief of a nation that prefers the pestilence of
despotism to the plague of anarchy.

DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a
language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a
most useful work.

DIE, n. The singular of “dice.” We seldom hear the word, because there is
a prohibitory proverb, “Never say die.” At long intervals, however, some
one says: “The die is cast,” which is not true, for it is cut. The word is
found in an immortal couplet by that eminent poet and domestic economist,
Senator Depew:

DIGESTION, n. The conversion of victuals into virtues. When the process is
imperfect, vices are evolved instead—a circumstance from which that
wicked writer, Dr. Jeremiah Blenn, infers that the ladies are the greater
sufferers from dyspepsia.

DIPLOMACY, n. The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.

DISABUSE, v.t. To present your neighbor with another and better error
than the one which he has deemed it advantageous to embrace.

DISCRIMINATE, v.i. To note the particulars in which one person or thing
is, if possible, more objectionable than another.

DISCUSSION, n. A method of confirming others in their errors.

DISOBEDIENCE, n. The silver lining to the cloud of servitude.

DISOBEY, v.t. To celebrate with an appropriate ceremony the maturity of a
command.

Israfel Brown

Adam

DISTANCE, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call
theirs, and keep.

DISTRESS, n. A disease incurred by exposure to the prosperity of a friend.

DIVINATION, n. The art of nosing out the occult. Divination is of as many
kinds as there are fruit-bearing varieties of the flowering dunce and the
early fool.

DOG, n. A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the
overflow and surplus of the world’s worship. This Divine Being in some of
his smaller and silkier incarnations takes, in the affection of Woman, the
place to which there is no human male aspirant. The Dog is a survival—an
anachronism. He toils not, neither does he spin, yet Solomon in all his
glory never lay upon a door-mat all day long, sun-soaked and fly-fed and
fat, while his master worked for the means wherewith to purchase the idle
wag of the Solomonic tail, seasoned with a look of tolerant recognition.

DRAGOON, n. A soldier who combines dash and steadiness in so equal measure
that he makes his advances on foot and his retreats on horseback.

DRAMATIST, n. One who adapts plays from the French.

DRUIDS, n. Priests and ministers of an ancient Celtic religion which did
not disdain to employ the humble allurement of human sacrifice. Very
little is now known about the Druids and their faith. Pliny says their
religion, originating in Britain, spread eastward as far as Persia. Caesar
says those who desired to study its mysteries went to Britain. Caesar
himself went to Britain, but does not appear to have obtained any high
preferment in the Druidical Church, although his talent for human
sacrifice was considerable.

Druids performed their religious rites in groves, and knew nothing of
church mortgages and the season-ticket system of pew rents. They were, in
short, heathens and—as they were once complacently catalogued by a
distinguished prelate of the Church of England— Dissenters.

DUCK-BILL, n. Your account at your restaurant during the canvas-back
season.

DUEL, n. A formal ceremony preliminary to the reconciliation of two
enemies. Great skill is necessary to its satisfactory observance; if
awkwardly performed the most unexpected and deplorable consequences
sometimes ensue. A long time ago a man lost his life in a duel.

Xamba Q. Dar

DULLARD, n. A member of the reigning dynasty in letters and life. The
Dullards came in with Adam, and being both numerous and sturdy have
overrun the habitable world. The secret of their power is their
insensibility to blows; tickle them with a bludgeon and they laugh with a
platitude. The Dullards came originally from Boeotia, whence they were
driven by stress of starvation, their dullness having blighted the crops.
For some centuries they infested Philistia, and many of them are called
Philistines to this day. In the turbulent times of the Crusades they
withdrew thence and gradually overspread all Europe, occupying most of the
high places in politics, art, literature, science and theology. Since a
detachment of Dullards came over with the Pilgrims in the Mayflower
and made a favorable report of the country, their increase by birth,
immigration, and conversion has been rapid and steady. According to the
most trustworthy statistics the number of adult Dullards in the United
States is but little short of thirty millions, including the
statisticians. The intellectual centre of the race is somewhere about
Peoria, Illinois, but the New England Dullard is the most shockingly
moral.

DUTY, n. That which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along
the line of desire.

G.J.

E

EAT, v.i. To perform successively (and successfully) the functions of
mastication, humectation, and deglutition.

“I was in the drawing-room, enjoying my dinner,” said Brillat-Savarin,
beginning an anecdote. “What!” interrupted Rochebriant; “eating dinner in
a drawing-room?” “I must beg you to observe, monsieur,” explained the
great gastronome, “that I did not say I was eating my dinner, but enjoying
it. I had dined an hour before.”

EAVESDROP, v.i. Secretly to overhear a catalogue of the crimes and vices
of another or yourself.

Gopete Sherany

ECCENTRICITY, n. A method of distinction so cheap that fools employ it to
accentuate their incapacity.

ECONOMY, n. Purchasing the barrel of whiskey that you do not need for the
price of the cow that you cannot afford.

EDIBLE, adj. Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a
toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.

EDITOR, n. A person who combines the judicial functions of Minos,
Rhadamanthus and Aeacus, but is placable with an obolus; a severely
virtuous censor, but so charitable withal that he tolerates the virtues of
others and the vices of himself; who flings about him the splintering
lightning and sturdy thunders of admonition till he resembles a bunch of
firecrackers petulantly uttering his mind at the tail of a dog; then
straightway murmurs a mild, melodious lay, soft as the cooing of a donkey
intoning its prayer to the evening star. Master of mysteries and lord of
law, high-pinnacled upon the throne of thought, his face suffused with the
dim splendors of the Transfiguration, his legs intertwisted and his tongue
a-cheek, the editor spills his will along the paper and cuts it off in
lengths to suit. And at intervals from behind the veil of the temple is
heard the voice of the foreman demanding three inches of wit and six lines
of religious meditation, or bidding him turn off the wisdom and whack up
some pathos.

EDUCATION, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the
foolish their lack of understanding.

EFFECT, n. The second of two phenomena which always occur together in the
same order. The first, called a Cause, is said to generate the other—which
is no more sensible than it would be for one who has never seen a dog
except in the pursuit of a rabbit to declare the rabbit the cause of a
dog.

EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

EJECTION, n. An approved remedy for the disease of garrulity. It is also
much used in cases of extreme poverty.

ELECTOR, n. One who enjoys the sacred privilege of voting for the man of
another man’s choice.

ELECTRICITY, n. The power that causes all natural phenomena not known to
be caused by something else. It is the same thing as lightning, and its
famous attempt to strike Dr. Franklin is one of the most picturesque
incidents in that great and good man’s career. The memory of Dr. Franklin
is justly held in great reverence, particularly in France, where a waxen
effigy of him was recently on exhibition, bearing the following touching
account of his life and services to science:

ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the
methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader’s mind the
dampest kind of dejection. The most famous English example begins somewhat
like this:

ELOQUENCE, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color
that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear
white.

ELYSIUM, n. An imaginary delightful country which the ancients foolishly
believed to be inhabited by the spirits of the good. This ridiculous and
mischievous fable was swept off the face of the earth by the early
Christians—may their souls be happy in Heaven!

EMANCIPATION, n. A bondman’s change from the tyranny of another to the
despotism of himself.

G.J.

EMBALM, v.i. To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it
feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance
between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile
and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre
crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction,
and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbor’s lawn as
a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long
inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the
meantime the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his glutoeus
maximus.

EMOTION, n. A prostrating disease caused by a determination of the heart
to the head. It is sometimes accompanied by a copious discharge of
hydrated chloride of sodium from the eyes.

ENCOMIAST, n. A special (but not particular) kind of liar.

END, n. The position farthest removed on either hand from the
Interlocutor.

Tinley Roquot

ENOUGH, pro. All there is in the world if you like it.

Arbely C. Strunk

ENTERTAINMENT, n. Any kind of amusement whose inroads stop short of death
by injection.

ENTHUSIASM, n. A distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance
in connection with outward applications of experience. Byron, who
recovered long enough to call it “entuzy-muzy,” had a relapse, which
carried him off—to Missolonghi.

ENVELOPE, n. The coffin of a document; the scabbard of a bill; the husk of
a remittance; the bed-gown of a love-letter.

ENVY, n. Emulation adapted to the meanest capacity.

EPAULET, n. An ornamented badge, serving to distinguish a military officer
from the enemy—that is to say, from the officer of lower rank to
whom his death would give promotion.

EPICURE, n. An opponent of Epicurus, an abstemious philosopher who,
holding that pleasure should be the chief aim of man, wasted no time in
gratification from the senses.

EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently
characterized by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom. Following are
some of the more notable epigrams of the learned and ingenious Dr. Jamrach
Holobom:

EPITAPH, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by
death have a retroactive effect. Following is a touching example:

ERUDITION, n. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

Romach Pute

ESOTERIC, adj. Very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The
ancient philosophies were of two kinds,—exoteric, those that
the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and esoteric,
those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most
profoundly affected modern thought and found greatest acceptance in our
time.

ETHNOLOGY, n. The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as
robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists.

EULOGY, n. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and
power, or the consideration to be dead.

EVANGELIST, n. A bearer of good tidings, particularly (in a religious
sense) such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our
neighbors.

EVERLASTING, adj. Lasting forever. It is with no small diffidence that I
venture to offer this brief and elementary definition, for I am not
unaware of the existence of a bulky volume by a sometime Bishop of
Worcester, entitled, A Partial Definition of the Word “Everlasting,” as
Used in the Authorized Version of the Holy Scriptures. His book was
once esteemed of great authority in the Anglican Church, and is still, I
understand, studied with pleasure to the mind and profit of the soul.

EXCEPTION, n. A thing which takes the liberty to differ from other things
of its class, as an honest man, a truthful woman, etc. “The exception
proves the rule” is an expression constantly upon the lips of the
ignorant, who parrot it from one another with never a thought of its
absurdity. In the Latin, “Exceptio probat regulam” means that the
exception tests the rule, puts it to the proof, not confirms
it. The malefactor who drew the meaning from this excellent dictum and
substituted a contrary one of his own exerted an evil power which appears
to be immortal.

EXCESS, n. In morals, an indulgence that enforces by appropriate penalties
the law of moderation.

EXCOMMUNICATION, n.

Gat Huckle

EXECUTIVE, n. An officer of the Government, whose duty it is to enforce
the wishes of the legislative power until such time as the judicial
department shall be pleased to pronounce them invalid and of no effect.
Following is an extract from an old book entitled, The Lunarian
Astonished—Pfeiffer & Co., Boston, 1803:

EXHORT, v.t. In religious affairs, to put the conscience of another upon
the spit and roast it to a nut-brown discomfort.

EXILE, n. One who serves his country by residing abroad, yet is not an
ambassador.

An English sea-captain being asked if he had read “The Exile of Erin,”
replied: “No, sir, but I should like to anchor on it.” Years afterwards,
when he had been hanged as a pirate after a career of unparalleled
atrocities, the following memorandum was found in the ship’s log that he
had kept at the time of his reply:

EXISTENCE, n.

EXPERIENCE, n. The wisdom that enables us to recognize as an undesirable
old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

Joel Frad Bink

EXPOSTULATION, n. One of the many methods by which fools prefer to lose
their friends.

EXTINCTION, n. The raw material out of which theology created the future
state.

F

FAIRY, n. A creature, variously fashioned and endowed, that formerly
inhabited the meadows and forests. It was nocturnal in its habits, and
somewhat addicted to dancing and the theft of children. The fairies are
now believed by naturalists to be extinct, though a clergyman of the Church
of England saw three near Colchester as lately as 1855, while passing
through a park after dining with the lord of the manor. The sight greatly
staggered him, and he was so affected that his account of it was
incoherent. In the year 1807 a troop of fairies visited a wood near Aix
and carried off the daughter of a peasant, who had been seen to enter it
with a bundle of clothing. The son of a wealthy bourgeois
disappeared about the same time, but afterward returned. He had seen the
abduction and been in pursuit of the fairies. Justinian Gaux, a writer of the
fourteenth century, avers that so great is the fairies’ power of
transformation that he saw one change itself into two opposing armies and
fight a battle with great slaughter, and that the next day, after it had
resumed its original shape and gone away, there were seven hundred bodies
of the slain which the villagers had to bury. He does not say if any of
the wounded recovered. In the time of Henry III, of England, a law was
made which prescribed the death penalty for “Kyllynge, wowndynge, or
mamynge” a fairy, and it was universally respected.

FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks
without knowledge, of things without parallel.

FAMOUS, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

Hassan Brubuddy

FASHION, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.

Naramy Oof

FEAST, n. A festival. A religious celebration usually signalized by
gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person
distinguished for abstemiousness. In the Roman Catholic Church feasts are
“movable” and “immovable,” but the celebrants are uniformly immovable
until they are full. In their earliest development these entertainments
took the form of feasts for the dead; such were held by the Greeks, under
the name Nemeseia, by the Aztecs and Peruvians, as in modern times
they are popular with the Chinese; though it is believed that the ancient
dead, like the modern, were light eaters. Among the many feasts of the
Romans was the Novemdiale, which was held, according to Livy,
whenever stones fell from heaven.

FELON, n. A person of greater enterprise than discretion, who in embracing
an opportunity has formed an unfortunate attachment.

FEMALE, n. One of the opposing, or unfair, sex.

G.J.

FIB, n. A lie that has not cut its teeth. An habitual liar’s nearest
approach to truth: the perigee of his eccentric orbit.

Bartle Quinker

FICKLENESS, n. The iterated satiety of an enterprising affection.

FIDDLE, n. An instrument to tickle human ears by friction of a horse’s
tail on the entrails of a cat.

Orm Pludge

FIDELITY, n. A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.

FINANCE, n. The art or science of managing revenues and resources for the
best advantage of the manager. The pronunciation of this word with the i
long and the accent on the first syllable is one of America’s most
precious discoveries and possessions.

FLAG, n. A colored rag borne above troops and hoisted on forts and ships.
It appears to serve the same purpose as certain signs that one sees on
vacant lots in London—”Rubbish may be shot here.”

FLESH, n. The Second Person of the secular Trinity.

FLOP, v. Suddenly to change one’s opinions and go over to another party.
The most notable flop on record was that of Saul of Tarsus, who has been
severely criticised as a turn-coat by some of our partisan journals.

FLY-SPECK, n. The prototype of punctuation. It is observed by Garvinus
that the systems of punctuation in use by the various literary nations
depended originally upon the social habits and general diet of the flies
infesting the several countries. These creatures, which have always been
distinguished for a neighborly and companionable familiarity with authors,
liberally or niggardly embellish the manuscripts in process of growth
under the pen, according to their bodily habit, bringing out the sense of
the work by a species of interpretation superior to, and independent of,
the writer’s powers. The “old masters” of literature—that is to say,
the early writers whose work is so esteemed by later scribes and critics
in the same language—never punctuated at all, but worked right along
free-handed, without that abruption of the thought which comes from the
use of points. (We observe the same thing in children to-day, whose usage
in this particular is a striking and beautiful instance of the law that
the infancy of individuals reproduces the methods and stages of
development characterizing the infancy of races.) In the work of these
primitive scribes all the punctuation is found, by the modern investigator
with his optical instruments and chemical tests, to have been inserted by
the writers’ ingenious and serviceable collaborator, the common house-fly—Musca
maledicta. In transcribing these ancient MSS, for the purpose of
either making the work their own or preserving what they naturally regard
as divine revelations, later writers reverently and accurately copy
whatever marks they find upon the papyrus or parchment, to the unspeakable
enhancement of the lucidity of the thought and value of the work. Writers
contemporary with the copyists naturally avail themselves of the obvious
advantages of these marks in their own work, and with such assistance as
the flies of their own household may be willing to grant, frequently rival
and sometimes surpass the older compositions, in respect at least of
punctuation, which is no small glory. Fully to understand the important
services that flies perform to literature it is only necessary to lay a
page of some popular novelist alongside a saucer of cream-and-molasses in
a sunny room and observe “how the wit brightens and the style refines” in
accurate proportion to the duration of exposure.

FOLLY, n. That “gift and faculty divine” whose creative and controlling
energy inspires Man’s mind, guides his actions and adorns his life.

Aramis Loto Frope

FOOL, n. A person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and
diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific,
omniform, omnipercipient, omniscient, omnipotent. He it was who invented
letters, printing, the railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph, the
platitude and the circle of the sciences. He created patriotism and taught
the nations war—founded theology, philosophy, law, medicine and
Chicago. He established monarchical and republican government. He is from
everlasting to everlasting—such as creation’s dawn beheld he fooleth
now. In the morning of time he sang upon primitive hills, and in the
noonday of existence headed the procession of being. His grandmotherly
hand was warmly tucked-in the set sun of civilization, and in the twilight
he prepares Man’s evening meal of milk-and-morality and turns down the
covers of the universal grave. And after the rest of us shall have retired
for the night of eternal oblivion he will sit up to write a history of
human civilization.

FORCE, n.

FOREFINGER, n. The finger commonly used in pointing out two malefactors.

FOREORDINATION, n. This looks like an easy word to define, but when I
consider that pious and learned theologians have spent long lives in
explaining it, and written libraries to explain their explanations; when I
remember that nations have been divided and bloody battles caused by the
difference between foreordination and predestination, and that millions of
treasure have been expended in the effort to prove and disprove its
compatibility with freedom of the will and the efficacy of prayer, praise,
and a religious life,—recalling these awful facts in the history of
the word, I stand appalled before the mighty problem of its signification,
abase my spiritual eyes, fearing to contemplate its portentous magnitude,
reverently uncover and humbly refer it to His Eminence Cardinal Gibbons
and His Grace Bishop Potter.

FORGETFULNESS, n. A gift of God bestowed upon doctors in compensation for
their destitution of conscience.

FORK, n. An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead
animals into the mouth. Formerly the knife was employed for this purpose,
and by many worthy persons is still thought to have many advantages over
the other tool, which, however, they do not altogether reject, but use to
assist in charging the knife. The immunity of these persons from swift and
awful death is one of the most striking proofs of God’s mercy to those
that hate Him.

FORMA PAUPERIS. [Latin] In the character of a poor person—a method
by which a litigant without money for lawyers is considerately permitted
to lose his case.

G.J.

FRANKALMOIGNE, n. The tenure by which a religious corporation holds lands
on condition of praying for the soul of the donor. In mediaeval times many
of the wealthiest fraternities obtained their estates in this simple and
cheap manner, and once when Henry VIII of England sent an officer to
confiscate certain vast possessions which a fraternity of monks held by
frankalmoigne, “What!” said the Prior, “would your master stay our
benefactor’s soul in Purgatory?” “Ay,” said the officer, coldly, “an ye
will not pray him thence for naught he must e’en roast.” “But look you, my
son,” persisted the good man, “this act hath rank as robbery of God!”
“Nay, nay, good father, my master the king doth but deliver Him from the
manifold temptations of too great wealth.”

FREEBOOTER, n. A conqueror in a small way of business, whose annexations
lack of the sanctifying merit of magnitude.

FREEDOM, n. Exemption from the stress of authority in a beggarly half
dozen of restraint’s infinite multitude of methods. A political condition
that every nation supposes itself to enjoy in virtual monopoly. Liberty.
The distinction between freedom and liberty is not accurately known;
naturalists have never been able to find a living specimen of either.

Blary O’Gary

FREEMASONS, n. An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and
fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among
working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of
past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the
generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up
distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and
Formless Void. The order was founded at different times by Charlemagne,
Julius Caesar, Cyrus, Solomon, Zoroaster, Confucious, Thothmes, and
Buddha. Its emblems and symbols have been found in the Catacombs of Paris
and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and the Chinese Great Wall, among
the temples of Karnak and Palmyra and in the Egyptian Pyramids—always
by a Freemason.

FRIENDLESS, adj. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune.
Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.

FRIENDSHIP, n. A ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only
one in foul.

Armit Huff Bettle

FROG, n. A reptile with edible legs. The first mention of frogs in profane
literature is in Homer’s narrative of the war between them and the mice.
Skeptical persons have doubted Homer’s authorship of the work, but the
learned, ingenious and industrious Dr. Schliemann has set the question
forever at rest by uncovering the bones of the slain frogs. One of the
forms of moral suasion by which Pharaoh was besought to favor the
Israelities was a plague of frogs, but Pharaoh, who liked them fricasees,
remarked, with truly oriental stoicism, that he could stand it as long as
the frogs and the Jews could; so the programme was changed. The frog is a
diligent songster, having a good voice but no ear. The libretto of his
favorite opera, as written by Aristophanes, is brief, simple and effective—”brekekex-koax”;
the music is apparently by that eminent composer, Richard Wagner. Horses
have a frog in each hoof—a thoughtful provision of nature, enabling
them to shine in a hurdle race.

FRYING-PAN, n. One part of the penal apparatus employed in that punitive
institution, a woman’s kitchen. The frying-pan was invented by Calvin, and
by him used in cooking span-long infants that had died without baptism;
and observing one day the horrible torment of a tramp who had incautiously
pulled a fried babe from the waste-dump and devoured it, it occurred to
the great divine to rob death of its terrors by introducing the frying-pan
into every household in Geneva. Thence it spread to all corners of the
world, and has been of invaluable assistance in the propagation of his
sombre faith. The following lines (said to be from the pen of his Grace
Bishop Potter) seem to imply that the usefulness of this utensil is not
limited to this world; but as the consequences of its employment in this
life reach over into the life to come, so also itself may be found on the
other side, rewarding its devotees:

FUNERAL, n. A pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by
enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that
deepens our groans and doubles our tears.

Jex Wopley

FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends
are true and our happiness is assured.

G

GALLOWS, n. A stage for the performance of miracle plays, in which the
leading actor is translated to heaven. In this country the gallows is
chiefly remarkable for the number of persons who escape it.

(Old play)

GARGOYLE, n. A rain-spout projecting from the eaves of mediaeval
buildings, commonly fashioned into a grotesque caricature of some personal
enemy of the architect or owner of the building. This was especially the
case in churches and ecclesiastical structures generally, in which the
gargoyles presented a perfect rogues’ gallery of local heretics and
controversialists. Sometimes when a new dean and chapter were installed
the old gargoyles were removed and others substituted having a closer
relation to the private animosities of the new incumbents.

GARTHER, n. An elastic band intended to keep a woman from coming out of
her stockings and desolating the country.

GENEROUS, adj. Originally this word meant noble by birth and was rightly
applied to a great multitude of persons. It now means noble by nature and
is taking a bit of a rest.

GENEALOGY, n. An account of one’s descent from an ancestor who did not
particularly care to trace his own.

GENTEEL, adj. Refined, after the fashion of a gent.

G.J.

GEOGRAPHER, n. A chap who can tell you offhand the difference between the
outside of the world and the inside.

Henry Haukhorn

GEOLOGY, n. The science of the earth’s crust—to which, doubtless,
will be added that of its interior whenever a man shall come up garrulous
out of a well. The geological formations of the globe already noted are
catalogued thus: The Primary, or lower one, consists of rocks, bones or
mired mules, gas-pipes, miners’ tools, antique statues minus the nose,
Spanish doubloons and ancestors. The Secondary is largely made up of red
worms and moles. The Tertiary comprises railway tracks, patent pavements,
grass, snakes, mouldy boots, beer bottles, tomato cans, intoxicated
citizens, garbage, anarchists, snap-dogs and fools.

GHOST, n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.

Jared Macphester

Accounting for the uncommon behavior of ghosts, Heine mentions somebody’s
ingenious theory to the effect that they are as much afraid of us as we of
them. Not quite, if I may judge from such tables of comparative speed as I
am able to compile from memories of my own experience.

There is one insuperable obstacle to a belief in ghosts. A ghost never
comes naked: he appears either in a winding-sheet or “in his habit as he
lived.” To believe in him, then, is to believe that not only have the dead
the power to make themselves visible after there is nothing left of them,
but that the same power inheres in textile fabrics. Supposing the products
of the loom to have this ability, what object would they have in
exercising it? And why does not the apparition of a suit of clothes
sometimes walk abroad without a ghost in it? These be riddles of
significance. They reach away down and get a convulsive grip on the very
tap-root of this flourishing faith.

GHOUL, n. A demon addicted to the reprehensible habit of devouring the
dead. The existence of ghouls has been disputed by that class of
controversialists who are more concerned to deprive the world of
comforting beliefs than to give it anything good in their place. In 1640
Father Secchi saw one in a cemetery near Florence and frightened it away
with the sign of the cross. He describes it as gifted with many heads and
an uncommon allowance of limbs, and he saw it in more than one place at a
time. The good man was coming away from dinner at the time and explains
that if he had not been “heavy with eating” he would have seized the demon
at all hazards. Atholston relates that a ghoul was caught by some sturdy
peasants in a churchyard at Sudbury and ducked in a horsepond. (He appears
to think that so distinguished a criminal should have been ducked in a
tank of rosewater.) The water turned at once to blood “and so contynues
unto ys daye.” The pond has since been bled with a ditch. As late as the
beginning of the fourteenth century a ghoul was cornered in the crypt of
the cathedral at Amiens and the whole population surrounded the place.
Twenty armed men with a priest at their head, bearing a crucifix, entered
and captured the ghoul, which, thinking to escape by the stratagem, had
transformed itself to the semblance of a well known citizen, but was
nevertheless hanged, drawn and quartered in the midst of hideous popular
orgies. The citizen whose shape the demon had assumed was so affected by
the sinister occurrence that he never again showed himself in Amiens and
his fate remains a mystery.

GLUTTON, n. A person who escapes the evils of moderation by committing
dyspepsia.

GNOME, n. In North-European mythology, a dwarfish imp inhabiting the
interior parts of the earth and having special custody of mineral
treasures. Bjorsen, who died in 1765, says gnomes were common enough in
the southern parts of Sweden in his boyhood, and he frequently saw them
scampering on the hills in the evening twilight. Ludwig Binkerhoof saw
three as recently as 1792, in the Black Forest, and Sneddeker avers that
in 1803 they drove a party of miners out of a Silesian mine. Basing our
computations upon data supplied by these statements, we find that the
gnomes were probably extinct as early as 1764.

GNOSTICS, n. A sect of philosophers who tried to engineer a fusion between
the early Christians and the Platonists. The former would not go into the
caucus and the combination failed, greatly to the chagrin of the fusion
managers.

GNU, n. An animal of South Africa, which in its domesticated state
resembles a horse, a buffalo and a stag. In its wild condition it is
something like a thunderbolt, an earthquake and a cyclone.

Jarn Leffer

GOOD, adj. Sensible, madam, to the worth of this present writer. Alive,
sir, to the advantages of letting him alone.

GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult
process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the
bird’s intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked
and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an “author,” there
results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl’s thought and
feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method,
is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant
powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.

GORGON, n.

GOUT, n. A physician’s name for the rheumatism of a rich patient.

GRACES, n. Three beautiful goddesses, Aglaia, Thalia and Euphrosyne, who
attended upon Venus, serving without salary. They were at no expense for
board and clothing, for they ate nothing to speak of and dressed according
to the weather, wearing whatever breeze happened to be blowing.

GRAMMAR, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for
the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

GRAPE, n.

Jamrach Holobom

GRAPESHOT, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the
demands of American Socialism.

GRAVE, n. A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the
medical student.

Pobeter Dunko

GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a
strength proportioned to the quantity of matter they contain— the
quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their
tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying
illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the
proof of A.

GREAT, adj.

Arion Spurl Doke

GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with
good reason.

In his great work on Divergent Lines of Racial Evolution, the
learned Professor Brayfugle argues from the prevalence of this gesture
—the shrug—among Frenchmen, that they are descended from
turtles and it is simply a survival of the habit of retracting the head
inside the shell. It is with reluctance that I differ with so eminent an
authority, but in my judgment (as more elaborately set forth and enforced
in my work entitled Hereditary Emotions—lib. II, c. XI) the
shrug is a poor foundation upon which to build so important a theory, for
previously to the Revolution the gesture was unknown. I have not a doubt
that it is directly referable to the terror inspired by the guillotine
during the period of that instrument’s activity.

GUNPOWDER, n. An agency employed by civilized nations for the settlement
of disputes which might become troublesome if left unadjusted. By most
writers the invention of gunpowder is ascribed to the Chinese, but not
upon very convincing evidence. Milton says it was invented by the devil to
dispel angels with, and this opinion seems to derive some support from the
scarcity of angels. Moreover, it has the hearty concurrence of the Hon.
James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture.

Secretary Wilson became interested in gunpowder through an event that
occurred on the Government experimental farm in the District of Columbia.
One day, several years ago, a rogue imperfectly reverent of the
Secretary’s profound attainments and personal character presented him with
a sack of gunpowder, representing it as the seed of the Flashawful
flabbergastor, a Patagonian cereal of great commercial value,
admirably adapted to this climate. The good Secretary was instructed to
spill it along in a furrow and afterward inhume it with soil. This he at
once proceeded to do, and had made a continuous line of it all the way
across a ten-acre field, when he was made to look backward by a shout from
the generous donor, who at once dropped a lighted match into the furrow at
the starting-point. Contact with the earth had somewhat dampened the
powder, but the startled functionary saw himself pursued by a tall moving
pillar of fire and smoke in fierce evolution. He stood for a moment
paralyzed and speechless, then he recollected an engagement and, dropping
all, absented himself thence with such surprising celerity that to the
eyes of spectators along the route selected he appeared like a long, dim
streak prolonging itself with inconceivable rapidity through seven
villages, and audibly refusing to be comforted. “Great Scott! what is
that?” cried a surveyor’s chainman, shading his eyes and gazing at the
fading line of agriculturist which bisected his visible horizon. “That,”
said the surveyor, carelessly glancing at the phenomenon and again
centering his attention upon his instrument, “is the Meridian of
Washington.”

H

HABEAS CORPUS. A writ by which a man may be taken out of jail when
confined for the wrong crime.

HABIT, n. A shackle for the free.

HADES, n. The lower world; the residence of departed spirits; the place
where the dead live.

Among the ancients the idea of Hades was not synonymous with our Hell,
many of the most respectable men of antiquity residing there in a very
comfortable kind of way. Indeed, the Elysian Fields themselves were a part
of Hades, though they have since been removed to Paris. When the Jacobean
version of the New Testament was in process of evolution the pious and
learned men engaged in the work insisted by a majority vote on translating
the Greek word “Aides” as “Hell”; but a conscientious minority member
secretly possessed himself of the record and struck out the objectional
word wherever he could find it. At the next meeting, the Bishop of
Salisbury, looking over the work, suddenly sprang to his feet and said
with considerable excitement: “Gentlemen, somebody has been razing ‘Hell’
here!” Years afterward the good prelate’s death was made sweet by the
reflection that he had been the means (under Providence) of making an
important, serviceable and immortal addition to the phraseology of the
English tongue.

HAG, n. An elderly lady whom you do not happen to like; sometimes called,
also, a hen, or cat. Old witches, sorceresses, etc., were called hags from
the belief that their heads were surrounded by a kind of baleful
lumination or nimbus—hag being the popular name of that peculiar
electrical light sometimes observed in the hair. At one time hag was not a
word of reproach: Drayton speaks of a “beautiful hag, all smiles,” much as
Shakespeare said, “sweet wench.” It would not now be proper to call your
sweetheart a hag—that compliment is reserved for the use of her
grandchildren.

HALF, n. One of two equal parts into which a thing may be divided, or
considered as divided. In the fourteenth century a heated discussion arose
among theologists and philosophers as to whether Omniscience could part an
object into three halves; and the pious Father Aldrovinus publicly prayed
in the cathedral at Rouen that God would demonstrate the affirmative of
the proposition in some signal and unmistakable way, and particularly (if
it should please Him) upon the body of that hardy blasphemer, Manutius
Procinus, who maintained the negative. Procinus, however, was spared to
die of the bite of a viper.

HALO, n. Properly, a luminous ring encircling an astronomical body, but
not infrequently confounded with “aureola,” or “nimbus,” a somewhat
similar phenomenon worn as a head-dress by divinities and saints. The halo
is a purely optical illusion, produced by moisture in the air, in the
manner of a rainbow; but the aureola is conferred as a sign of superior
sanctity, in the same way as a bishop’s mitre, or the Pope’s tiara. In the
painting of the Nativity, by Szedgkin, a pious artist of Pesth, not only
do the Virgin and the Child wear the nimbus, but an ass nibbling hay from
the sacred manger is similarly decorated and, to his lasting honor be it
said, appears to bear his unaccustomed dignity with a truly saintly grace.

HAND, n. A singular instrument worn at the end of the human arm and
commonly thrust into somebody’s pocket.

HANDKERCHIEF, n. A small square of silk or linen, used in various ignoble
offices about the face and especially serviceable at funerals to conceal
the lack of tears. The handkerchief is of recent invention; our ancestors
knew nothing of it and intrusted its duties to the sleeve. Shakespeare’s
introducing it into the play of “Othello” is an anachronism: Desdemona
dried her nose with her skirt, as Dr. Mary Walker and other reformers have
done with their coattails in our own day—an evidence that
revolutions sometimes go backward.

HANGMAN, n. An officer of the law charged with duties of the highest
dignity and utmost gravity, and held in hereditary disesteem by a populace
having a criminal ancestry. In some of the American States his functions
are now performed by an electrician, as in New Jersey, where executions by
electricity have recently been ordered—the first instance known to
this lexicographer of anybody questioning the expediency of hanging
Jerseymen.

HAPPINESS, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery
of another.

HARANGUE, n. A speech by an opponent, who is known as an harangue-outang.

HARBOR, n. A place where ships taking shelter from storms are exposed to
the fury of the customs.

HARMONISTS, n. A sect of Protestants, now extinct, who came from Europe in
the beginning of the last century and were distinguished for the
bitterness of their internal controversies and dissensions.

HASH, x. There is no definition for this word—nobody knows what hash
is.

HATCHET, n. A young axe, known among Indians as a Thomashawk.

John Lukkus

HATRED, n. A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another’s
superiority.

HEAD-MONEY, n. A capitation tax, or poll-tax.

G.J.

HEARSE, n. Death’s baby-carriage.

HEART, n. An automatic, muscular blood-pump. Figuratively, this useful
organ is said to be the seat of emotions and sentiments—a very
pretty fancy which, however, is nothing but a survival of a once universal
belief. It is now known that the sentiments and emotions reside in the
stomach, being evolved from food by chemical action of the gastric fluid.
The exact process by which a beefsteak becomes a feeling—tender or
not, according to the age of the animal from which it was cut; the
successive stages of elaboration through which a caviar sandwich is
transmuted to a quaint fancy and reappears as a pungent epigram; the
marvelous functional methods of converting a hard-boiled egg into
religious contrition, or a cream-puff into a sigh of sensibility—these
things have been patiently ascertained by M. Pasteur, and by him expounded
with convincing lucidity. (See, also, my monograph, The Essential
Identity of the Spiritual Affections and Certain Intestinal Gases Freed in
Digestion—4to, 687 pp.) In a scientific work entitled, I
believe, Delectatio Demonorum (John Camden Hotton, London, 1873)
this view of the sentiments receives a striking illustration; and for
further light consult Professor Dam’s famous treatise on Love as a
Product of Alimentary Maceration.

HEAT, n.

Gorton Swope

HEATHEN, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something
that he can see and feel. According to Professor Howison, of the
California State University, Hebrews are heathens.

Bissell Gip

HEAVEN, n. A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of
their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you
expound your own.

HEBREW, n. A male Jew, as distinguished from the Shebrew, an altogether
superior creation.

HELPMATE, n. A wife, or bitter half.

Marley Wottel

HEMP, n. A plant from whose fibrous bark is made an article of neckwear
which is frequently put on after public speaking in the open air and
prevents the wearer from taking cold.

HERMIT, n. A person whose vices and follies are not sociable.

HERS, pron. His.

HIBERNATE, v.i. To pass the winter season in domestic seclusion. There
have been many singular popular notions about the hibernation of various
animals. Many believe that the bear hibernates during the whole winter and
subsists by mechanically sucking its paws. It is admitted that it comes
out of its retirement in the spring so lean that it had to try twice
before it can cast a shadow. Three or four centuries ago, in England, no
fact was better attested than that swallows passed the winter months in
the mud at the bottom of their brooks, clinging together in globular
masses. They have apparently been compelled to give up the custom on
account of the foulness of the brooks. Sotus Ecobius discovered in Central
Asia a whole nation of people who hibernate. By some investigators, the
fasting of Lent is supposed to have been originally a modified form of
hibernation, to which the Church gave a religious significance; but this
view was strenuously opposed by that eminent authority, Bishop Kip, who
did not wish any honors denied to the memory of the Founder of his family.

HIPPOGRIFF, n. An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half
griffin. The griffin was itself a compound creature, half lion and half
eagle. The hippogriff was actually, therefore, a one-quarter eagle, which
is two dollars and fifty cents in gold. The study of zoology is full of
surprises.

HISTORIAN, n. A broad-gauge gossip.

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which
are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

Salder Bupp

HOG, n. A bird remarkable for the catholicity of its appetite and serving
to illustrate that of ours. Among the Mahometans and Jews, the hog is not
in favor as an article of diet, but is respected for the delicacy and the
melody of its voice. It is chiefly as a songster that the fowl is
esteemed; the cage of him in full chorus has been known to draw tears from
two persons at once. The scientific name of this dicky-bird is Porcus
Rockefelleri. Mr. Rockefeller did not discover the hog, but it is
considered his by right of resemblance.

HOMOEOPATHIST, n. The humorist of the medical profession.

HOMOEOPATHY, n. A school of medicine midway between Allopathy and
Christian Science. To the last both the others are distinctly inferior,
for Christian Science will cure imaginary diseases, and they can not.

HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four
kinds of homocide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy,
but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by
one kind or another—the classification is for advantage of the
lawyers.

HOMILETICS, n. The science of adapting sermons to the spiritual needs,
capacities and conditions of the congregation.

Biography of Bishop Potter

HONORABLE, adj. Afflicted with an impediment in one’s reach. In
legislative bodies it is customary to mention all members as honorable;
as, “the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur.”

HOPE, n. Desire and expectation rolled into one.

Fogarty Weffing

HOSPITALITY, n. The virtue which induces us to feed and lodge certain
persons who are not in need of food and lodging.

HOSTILITY, n. A peculiarly sharp and specially applied sense of the
earth’s overpopulation. Hostility is classified as active and passive; as
(respectively) the feeling of a woman for her female friends, and that
which she entertains for all the rest of her sex.

HOURI, n. A comely female inhabiting the Mohammedan Paradise to make
things cheery for the good Mussulman, whose belief in her existence marks
a noble discontent with his earthly spouse, whom he denies a soul. By that
good lady the Houris are said to be held in deficient esteem.

HOUSE, n. A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse,
beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus and microbe. House of
Correction, a place of reward for political and personal service, and
for the detention of offenders and appropriations. House of God, a
building with a steeple and a mortgage on it. House-dog, a
pestilent beast kept on domestic premises to insult persons passing by and
appal the hardy visitor. House-maid, a youngerly person of the
opposing sex employed to be variously disagreeable and ingeniously unclean
in the station in which it has pleased God to place her.

HOUSELESS, adj. Having paid all taxes on household goods.

HOVEL, n. The fruit of a flower called the Palace.

G.J.

HUMANITY, n. The human race, collectively, exclusive of the anthropoid
poets.

HUMORIST, n. A plague that would have softened down the hoar austerity of
Pharaoh’s heart and persuaded him to dismiss Israel with his best wishes,
cat-quick.

Alexander Poke

HURRICANE, n. An atmospheric demonstration once very common but now
generally abandoned for the tornado and cyclone. The hurricane is still in
popular use in the West Indies and is preferred by certain old-fashioned
sea-captains. It is also used in the construction of the upper decks of
steamboats, but generally speaking, the hurricane’s usefulness has
outlasted it.

HURRY, n. The dispatch of bunglers.

HUSBAND, n. One who, having dined, is charged with the care of the plate.

HYBRID, n. A pooled issue.

HYDRA, n. A kind of animal that the ancients catalogued under many heads.

HYENA, n. A beast held in reverence by some oriental nations from its
habit of frequenting at night the burial-places of the dead. But the
medical student does that.

HYPOCHONDRIASIS, n. Depression of one’s own spirits.

Bogul S. Purvy

HYPOCRITE, n. One who, professing virtues that he does not respect secures
the advantage of seeming to be what he despises.

I

I is the first letter of the alphabet, the first word of the language, the
first thought of the mind, the first object of affection. In grammar it is
a pronoun of the first person and singular number. Its plural is said to
be We, but how there can be more than one myself is doubtless
clearer to the grammarians than it is to the author of this incomparable
dictionary. Conception of two myselfs is difficult, but fine. The frank
yet graceful use of “I” distinguishes a good writer from a bad; the latter
carries it with the manner of a thief trying to cloak his loot.

ICHOR, n. A fluid that serves the gods and goddesses in place of blood.

Mary Doke

ICONOCLAST, n. A breaker of idols, the worshipers whereof are imperfectly
gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest that he
unbuildeth but doth not reedify, that he pulleth down but pileth not up.
For the poor things would have other idols in place of those he thwacketh
upon the mazzard and dispelleth. But the iconoclast saith: “Ye shall have
none at all, for ye need them not; and if the rebuilder fooleth round
hereabout, behold I will depress the head of him and sit thereon till he
squawk it.”

IDIOT, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human
affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is
not confined to any special field of thought or action, but “pervades and
regulates the whole.” He has the last word in everything; his decision is
unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the
limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new
sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.

IGNORAMUS, n. A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge
familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing
about.

Borelli

ILLUMINATI, n. A sect of Spanish heretics of the latter part of the
sixteenth century; so called because they were light weights— cunctationes
illuminati.

ILLUSTRIOUS, adj. Suitably placed for the shafts of malice, envy and
detraction.

IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint
ownership.

IMBECILITY, n. A kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affecting
censorious critics of this dictionary.

IMMIGRANT, n. An unenlightened person who thinks one country better than
another.

IMMODEST, adj. Having a strong sense of one’s own merit, coupled with a
feeble conception of worth in others.

Sukker Uffro

IMMORAL, adj. Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the
greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to
be considered wrong, wicked, immoral. If man’s notions of right and wrong
have any other basis than this of expediency; if they originated, or could
have originated, in any other way; if actions have in themselves a moral
character apart from, and nowise dependent on, their consequences—then
all philosophy is a lie and reason a disorder of the mind.

IMMORTALITY, n.

G.J.

IMPALE, v.t. In popular usage to pierce with any weapon which remains
fixed in the wound. This, however, is inaccurate; to impale is, properly,
to put to death by thrusting an upright sharp stake into the body, the
victim being left in a sitting position. This was a common mode of
punishment among many of the nations of antiquity, and is still in high
favor in China and other parts of Asia. Down to the beginning of the
fifteenth century it was widely employed in “churching” heretics and
schismatics. Wolecraft calls it the “stoole of repentynge,” and among the
common people it was jocularly known as “riding the one legged horse.”
Ludwig Salzmann informs us that in Thibet impalement is considered the
most appropriate punishment for crimes against religion; and although in
China it is sometimes awarded for secular offences, it is most frequently
adjudged in cases of sacrilege. To the person in actual experience of
impalement it must be a matter of minor importance by what kind of civil
or religious dissent he was made acquainted with its discomforts; but
doubtless he would feel a certain satisfaction if able to contemplate
himself in the character of a weather-cock on the spire of the True
Church.

IMPARTIAL, adj. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from
espousing either side of a controversy or adopting either of two
conflicting opinions.

IMPENITENCE, n. A state of mind intermediate in point of time between sin
and punishment.

IMPIETY, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.

IMPOSITION, n. The act of blessing or consecrating by the laying on of
hands—a ceremony common to many ecclesiastical systems, but
performed with the frankest sincerity by the sect known as Thieves.

Pollo Doncas

IMPOSTOR n. A rival aspirant to public honors.

IMPROBABILITY, n.

IMPROVIDENCE, n. Provision for the needs of to-day from the revenues of
to-morrow.

IMPUNITY, n. Wealth.

INADMISSIBLE, adj. Not competent to be considered. Said of certain kinds
of testimony which juries are supposed to be unfit to be entrusted with,
and which judges, therefore, rule out, even of proceedings before
themselves alone. Hearsay evidence is inadmissible because the person
quoted was unsworn and is not before the court for examination; yet most
momentous actions, military, political, commercial and of every other
kind, are daily undertaken on hearsay evidence. There is no religion in
the world that has any other basis than hearsay evidence. Revelation is
hearsay evidence; that the Scriptures are the word of God we have only the
testimony of men long dead whose identity is not clearly established and
who are not known to have been sworn in any sense. Under the rules of
evidence as they now exist in this country, no single assertion in the
Bible has in its support any evidence admissible in a court of law. It
cannot be proved that the battle of Blenheim ever was fought, that there
was such as person as Julius Caesar, such an empire as Assyria.

But as records of courts of justice are admissible, it can easily be
proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a
scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain
women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is
still unimpeachable. The judges’ decisions based on it were sound in logic
and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved
than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered
death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are
alike destitute of value.

INAUSPICIOUSLY, adv. In an unpromising manner, the auspices being
unfavorable. Among the Romans it was customary before undertaking any
important action or enterprise to obtain from the augurs, or state
prophets, some hint of its probable outcome; and one of their favorite and
most trustworthy modes of divination consisted in observing the flight of
birds—the omens thence derived being called auspices.
Newspaper reporters and certain miscreant lexicographers have decided that
the word—always in the plural—shall mean “patronage” or
“management”; as, “The festivities were under the auspices of the Ancient
and Honorable Order of Body-Snatchers”; or, “The hilarities were
auspicated by the Knights of Hunger.”

G.J.

INCOME, n. The natural and rational gauge and measure of respectability,
the commonly accepted standards being artificial, arbitrary and
fallacious; for, as “Sir Sycophas Chrysolater” in the play has justly
remarked, “the true use and function of property (in whatsoever it
consisteth—coins, or land, or houses, or merchant-stuff, or anything
which may be named as holden of right to one’s own subservience) as also
of honors, titles, preferments and place, and all favor and acquaintance
of persons of quality or ableness, are but to get money. Hence it
followeth that all things are truly to be rated as of worth in measure of
their serviceableness to that end; and their possessors should take rank
in agreement thereto, neither the lord of an unproducing manor, howsoever
broad and ancient, nor he who bears an unremunerate dignity, nor yet the
pauper favorite of a king, being esteemed of level excellency with him
whose riches are of daily accretion; and hardly should they whose wealth
is barren claim and rightly take more honor than the poor and unworthy.”

INCOMPATIBILITY, n. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the
taste for domination. Incompatibility may, however, consist of a meek-eyed
matron living just around the corner. It has even been known to wear a
moustache.

INCOMPOSSIBLE, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things
are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of
them, but not enough for both—as Walt Whitman’s poetry and God’s
mercy to man. Incompossibility, it will be seen, is only incompatibility
let loose. Instead of such low language as “Go heel yourself—I mean
to kill you on sight,” the words, “Sir, we are incompossible,” would
convey an equally significant intimation and in stately courtesy are
altogether superior.

INCUBUS, n. One of a race of highly improper demons who, though probably
not wholly extinct, may be said to have seen their best nights. For a
complete account of incubi and succubi, including incubae
and succubae, see the Liber Demonorum of Protassus (Paris,
1328), which contains much curious information that would be out of place
in a dictionary intended as a text-book for the public schools.

Victor Hugo relates that in the Channel Islands Satan himself—
tempted more than elsewhere by the beauty of the women, doubtless—
sometimes plays at incubus, greatly to the inconvenience and alarm
of the good dames who wish to be loyal to their marriage vows, generally
speaking. A certain lady applied to the parish priest to learn how they
might, in the dark, distinguish the hardy intruder from their husbands.
The holy man said they must feel his brow for horns; but Hugo is
ungallant enough to hint a doubt of the efficacy of the test.

INCUMBENT, n. A person of the liveliest interest to the outcumbents.

INDECISION, n. The chief element of success; “for whereas,” saith Sir
Thomas Brewbold, “there is but one way to do nothing and divers way to do
something, whereof, to a surety, only one is the right way, it followeth
that he who from indecision standeth still hath not so many chances of
going astray as he who pusheth forwards”—a most clear and
satisfactory exposition of the matter.

“Your prompt decision to attack,” said General Grant on a certain occasion
to General Gordon Granger, “was admirable; you had but five minutes to
make up your mind in.”

“Yes, sir,” answered the victorious subordinate, “it is a great thing to
know exactly what to do in an emergency. When in doubt whether to
attack or retreat I never hesitate a moment—I toss up a copper.”

“Do you mean to say that’s what you did this time?”

“Yes, General; but for Heaven’s sake don’t reprimand me: I disobeyed the
coin.”

INDIFFERENT, adj. Imperfectly sensible to distinctions among things.

Apuleius M. Gokul

INDIGESTION, n. A disease which the patient and his friends frequently
mistake for deep religious conviction and concern for the salvation of
mankind. As the simple Red Man of the western wild put it, with, it must
be confessed, a certain force: “Plenty well, no pray; big bellyache, heap
God.”

INDISCRETION, n. The guilt of woman.

INEXPEDIENT, adj. Not calculated to advance one’s interests.

INFANCY, n. The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, “Heaven
lies about us.” The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

INFERIAE, n. [Latin] Among the Greeks and Romans, sacrifices for
propitiation of the Dii Manes, or souls of the dead heroes; for the
pious ancients could not invent enough gods to satisfy their spiritual
needs, and had to have a number of makeshift deities, or, as a sailor
might say, jury-gods, which they made out of the most unpromising
materials. It was while sacrificing a bullock to the spirit of Agamemnon
that Laiaides, a priest of Aulis, was favored with an audience of that
illustrious warrior’s shade, who prophetically recounted to him the birth
of Christ and the triumph of Christianity, giving him also a rapid but
tolerably complete review of events down to the reign of Saint Louis. The
narrative ended abruptly at that point, owing to the inconsiderate crowing
of a cock, which compelled the ghosted King of Men to scamper back to
Hades. There is a fine mediaeval flavor to this story, and as it has not
been traced back further than Pere Brateille, a pious but obscure writer
at the court of Saint Louis, we shall probably not err on the side of
presumption in considering it apocryphal, though Monsignor Capel’s
judgment of the matter might be different; and to that I bow—wow.

INFIDEL, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian
religion; in Constantinople, one who does. (See GIAOUR.) A kind of
scoundrel imperfectly reverent of, and niggardly contributory to, divines,
ecclesiastics, popes, parsons, canons, monks, mollahs, voodoos,
presbyters, hierophants, prelates, obeah-men, abbes, nuns, missionaries,
exhorters, deacons, friars, hadjis, high-priests, muezzins, brahmins,
medicine-men, confessors, eminences, elders, primates, prebendaries,
pilgrims, prophets, imaums, beneficiaries, clerks, vicars-choral,
archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, preachers, padres, abbotesses,
caloyers, palmers, curates, patriarchs, bonezs, santons, beadsmen,
canonesses, residentiaries, diocesans, deans, subdeans, rural deans,
abdals, charm-sellers, archdeacons, hierarchs, class-leaders, incumbents,
capitulars, sheiks, talapoins, postulants, scribes, gooroos, precentors,
beadles, fakeers, sextons, reverences, revivalists, cenobites, perpetual
curates, chaplains, mudjoes, readers, novices, vicars, pastors, rabbis,
ulemas, lamas, sacristans, vergers, dervises, lectors, church wardens,
cardinals, prioresses, suffragans, acolytes, rectors, cures, sophis,
mutifs and pumpums.

INFLUENCE, n. In politics, a visionary quo given in exchange for a
substantial quid.

INFRALAPSARIAN, n. One who ventures to believe that Adam need not have
sinned unless he had a mind to—in opposition to the Supralapsarians,
who hold that that luckless person’s fall was decreed from the beginning.
Infralapsarians are sometimes called Sublapsarians without material effect
upon the importance and lucidity of their views about Adam.

G.J.

INGRATE, n. One who receives a benefit from another, or is otherwise an
object of charity.

Ariel Selp

INJURY, n. An offense next in degree of enormity to a slight.

INJUSTICE, n. A burden which of all those that we load upon others and
carry ourselves is lightest in the hands and heaviest upon the back.

INK, n. A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic and
water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote
intellectual crime. The properties of ink are peculiar and contradictory:
it may be used to make reputations and unmake them; to blacken them and to
make them white; but it is most generally and acceptably employed as a
mortar to bind together the stones of an edifice of fame, and as a
whitewash to conceal afterward the rascal quality of the material. There
are men called journalists who have established ink baths which some
persons pay money to get into, others to get out of. Not infrequently it
occurs that a person who has paid to get in pays twice as much to get out.

INNATE, adj. Natural, inherent—as innate ideas, that is to say,
ideas that we are born with, having had them previously imparted to us.
The doctrine of innate ideas is one of the most admirable faiths of
philosophy, being itself an innate idea and therefore inaccessible to
disproof, though Locke foolishly supposed himself to have given it “a
black eye.” Among innate ideas may be mentioned the belief in one’s
ability to conduct a newspaper, in the greatness of one’s country, in the
superiority of one’s civilization, in the importance of one’s personal
affairs and in the interesting nature of one’s diseases.

IN’ARDS, n. The stomach, heart, soul and other bowels. Many eminent
investigators do not class the soul as an in’ard, but that acute observer
and renowned authority, Dr. Gunsaulus, is persuaded that the mysterious
organ known as the spleen is nothing less than our immortal part. To the
contrary, Professor Garrett P. Servis holds that man’s soul is that
prolongation of his spinal marrow which forms the pith of his no tail; and
for demonstration of his faith points confidently to the fact that
tailed animals have no souls. Concerning these two theories, it is best to
suspend judgment by believing both.

INSCRIPTION, n. Something written on another thing. Inscriptions are of
many kinds, but mostly memorial, intended to commemorate the fame of some
illustrious person and hand down to distant ages the record of his
services and virtues. To this class of inscriptions belongs the name of
John Smith, penciled on the Washington monument. Following are examples of
memorial inscriptions on tombstones: (See EPITAPH.)

INSECTIVORA, n.

Sempen Railey

INSURANCE, n. An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is
permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man
who keeps the table.

INSURRECTION, n. An unsuccessful revolution. Disaffection’s failure to
substitute misrule for bad government.

INTENTION, n. The mind’s sense of the prevalence of one set of influences
over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or
remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.

INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to
understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the
interpreter’s advantage for the other to have said.

INTERREGNUM, n. The period during which a monarchical country is governed
by a warm spot on the cushion of the throne. The experiment of letting the
spot grow cold has commonly been attended by most unhappy results from the
zeal of many worthy persons to make it warm again.

INTIMACY, n. A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for
their mutual destruction.

INTRODUCTION, n. A social ceremony invented by the devil for the
gratification of his servants and the plaguing of his enemies. The
introduction attains its most malevolent development in this country,
being, indeed, closely related to our political system. Every American
being the equal of every other American, it follows that everybody has the
right to know everybody else, which implies the right to introduce without
request or permission. The Declaration of Independence should have read
thus:

INVENTOR, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers
and springs, and believes it civilization.

IRRELIGION, n. The principal one of the great faiths of the world.

ITCH, n. The patriotism of a Scotchman.

J

J is a consonant in English, but some nations use it as a vowel—
than which nothing could be more absurd. Its original form, which has been
but slightly modified, was that of the tail of a subdued dog, and it was
not a letter but a character, standing for a Latin verb, jacere,
“to throw,” because when a stone is thrown at a dog the dog’s tail assumes
that shape. This is the origin of the letter, as expounded by the renowned
Dr. Jocolpus Bumer, of the University of Belgrade, who established his
conclusions on the subject in a work of three quarto volumes and committed
suicide on being reminded that the j in the Roman alphabet had originally
no curl.

JEALOUS, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be
lost only if not worth keeping.

JESTER, n. An officer formerly attached to a king’s household, whose
business it was to amuse the court by ludicrous actions and utterances,
the absurdity being attested by his motley costume. The king himself being
attired with dignity, it took the world some centuries to discover that
his own conduct and decrees were sufficiently ridiculous for the amusement
not only of his court but of all mankind. The jester was commonly called a
fool, but the poets and romancers have ever delighted to represent him as
a singularly wise and witty person. In the circus of to-day the melancholy
ghost of the court fool effects the dejection of humbler audiences with
the same jests wherewith in life he gloomed the marble hall, panged the
patrician sense of humor and tapped the tank of royal tears.

Barel Dort

JEWS-HARP, n. An unmusical instrument, played by holding it fast with the
teeth and trying to brush it away with the finger.

JOSS-STICKS, n. Small sticks burned by the Chinese in their pagan
tomfoolery, in imitation of certain sacred rites of our holy religion.

JUSTICE, n. A commodity which is a more or less adulterated condition the
State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and
personal service.

K

K is a consonant that we get from the Greeks, but it can be traced away
back beyond them to the Cerathians, a small commercial nation inhabiting
the peninsula of Smero. In their tongue it was called Klatch, which
means “destroyed.” The form of the letter was originally precisely that of
our H, but the erudite Dr. Snedeker explains that it was altered to its
present shape to commemorate the destruction of the great temple of Jarute
by an earthquake, circa 730 B.C. This building was famous for the
two lofty columns of its portico, one of which was broken in half by the
catastrophe, the other remaining intact. As the earlier form of the letter
is supposed to have been suggested by these pillars, so, it is thought by
the great antiquary, its later was adopted as a simple and natural—not
to say touching—means of keeping the calamity ever in the national
memory. It is not known if the name of the letter was altered as an
additional mnemonic, or if the name was always Klatch and the
destruction one of nature’s puns. As each theory seems probable enough, I
see no objection to believing both—and Dr. Snedeker arrayed himself
on that side of the question.

KEEP, v.t.

Durang Gophel Arn

KILL, v.t. To create a vacancy without nominating a successor.

KILT, n. A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in
Scotland.

KINDNESS, n. A brief preface to ten volumes of exaction.

KING, n. A male person commonly known in America as a “crowned head,”
although he never wears a crown and has usually no head to speak of.

Oogum Bem

KING’S EVIL, n. A malady that was formerly cured by the touch of the
sovereign, but has now to be treated by the physicians. Thus “the most
pious Edward” of England used to lay his royal hand upon the ailing
subjects and make them whole—

as the “Doctor” in Macbeth hath it. This useful property of the
royal hand could, it appears, be transmitted along with other crown
properties; for according to “Malcolm,”

But the gift somewhere dropped out of the line of succession: the later
sovereigns of England have not been tactual healers, and the disease once
honored with the name “king’s evil” now bears the humbler one of
“scrofula,” from scrofa, a sow. The date and author of the
following epigram are known only to the author of this dictionary, but it
is old enough to show that the jest about Scotland’s national disorder is
not a thing of yesterday.

The superstition that maladies can be cured by royal taction is dead, but
like many a departed conviction it has left a monument of custom to keep
its memory green. The practice of forming a line and shaking the
President’s hand had no other origin, and when that great dignitary
bestows his healing salutation on

he and his patients are handing along an extinguished torch which once was
kindled at the altar-fire of a faith long held by all classes of men. It
is a beautiful and edifying “survival”—one which brings the sainted
past close home in our “business and bosoms.”

KISS, n. A word invented by the poets as a rhyme for “bliss.” It is
supposed to signify, in a general way, some kind of rite or ceremony
appertaining to a good understanding; but the manner of its performance is
unknown to this lexicographer.

KLEPTOMANIAC, n. A rich thief.

KNIGHT, n.

KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been
written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked
imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

L

LABOR, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

LAND, n. A part of the earth’s surface, considered as property. The theory
that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the
foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the
superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have
the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the
right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted
wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area
of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for
D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist.

Dodle

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another’s
treasure.

LAOCOON, n. A famous piece of antique scripture representing a priest of
that name and his two sons in the folds of two enormous serpents. The
skill and diligence with which the old man and lads support the serpents
and keep them up to their work have been justly regarded as one of the
noblest artistic illustrations of the mastery of human intelligence over
brute inertia.

LAP, n. One of the most important organs of the female system—an
admirable provision of nature for the repose of infancy, but chiefly
useful in rural festivities to support plates of cold chicken and heads of
adult males. The male of our species has a rudimentary lap, imperfectly
developed and in no way contributing to the animal’s substantial welfare.

LAST, n. A shoemaker’s implement, named by a frowning Providence as
opportunity to the maker of puns.

Gargo Repsky

LAUGHTER, n. An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the
features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and,
though intermittent, incurable. Liability to attacks of laughter is one of
the characteristics distinguishing man from the animals— these being
not only inaccessible to the provocation of his example, but impregnable
to the microbes having original jurisdiction in bestowal of the disease.
Whether laughter could be imparted to animals by inoculation from the
human patient is a question that has not been answered by experimentation.
Dr. Meir Witchell holds that the infectious character of laughter is due to
the instantaneous fermentation of sputa diffused in a spray. From
this peculiarity he names the disorder Convulsio spargens.

LAUREATE, adj. Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet
Laureate is an officer of the sovereign’s court, acting as dancing
skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral. Of
all incumbents of that high office, Robert Southey had the most notable
knack at drugging the Samson of public joy and cutting his hair to the
quick; and he had an artistic color-sense which enabled him so to blacken
a public grief as to give it the aspect of a national crime.

LAUREL, n. The laurus, a vegetable dedicated to Apollo, and
formerly defoliated to wreathe the brows of victors and such poets as had
influence at court. (Vide supra.)

LAW, n.

G.J.

LAWFUL, adj. Compatible with the will of a judge having jurisdiction.

LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

LAZINESS, n. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.

LEAD, n. A heavy blue-gray metal much used in giving stability to light
lovers—particularly to those who love not wisely but other men’s
wives. Lead is also of great service as a counterpoise to an argument of
such weight that it turns the scale of debate the wrong way. An
interesting fact in the chemistry of international controversy is that at
the point of contact of two patriotisms lead is precipitated in great
quantities.

LEARNING, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

LECTURER, n. One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and
his faith in your patience.

LEGACY, n. A gift from one who is legging it out of this vale of tears.

LEONINE, adj. Unlike a menagerie lion. Leonine verses are those in which a
word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end, as in this
famous passage from Bella Peeler Silcox:

It should be explained that Mrs. Silcox does not undertake to teach
pronunciation of the Greek and Latin tongues. Leonine verses are so called
in honor of a poet named Leo, whom prosodists appear to find a pleasure in
believing to have been the first to discover that a rhyming couplet could
be run into a single line.

LETTUCE, n. An herb of the genus Lactuca, “Wherewith,” says that
pious gastronome, Hengist Pelly, “God has been pleased to reward the good
and punish the wicked. For by his inner light the righteous man has
discerned a manner of compounding for it a dressing to the appetency
whereof a multitude of gustible condiments conspire, being reconciled and
ameliorated with profusion of oil, the entire comestible making glad the
heart of the godly and causing his face to shine. But the person of
spiritual unworth is successfully tempted to the Adversary to eat of
lettuce with destitution of oil, mustard, egg, salt and garlic, and with a
rascal bath of vinegar polluted with sugar. Wherefore the person of
spiritual unworth suffers an intestinal pang of strange complexity and
raises the song.”

LEVIATHAN, n. An enormous aquatic animal mentioned by Job. Some suppose it
to have been the whale, but that distinguished ichthyologer, Dr. Jordan,
of Stanford University, maintains with considerable heat that it was a
species of gigantic Tadpole (Thaddeus Polandensis) or Polliwig—Maria
pseudo-hirsuta. For an exhaustive description and history of the
Tadpole consult the famous monograph of Jane Potter, Thaddeus of Warsaw.

LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording
some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can
to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.
For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be
considered “as one having authority,” whereas his function is only to make
a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human
understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its
right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statute.
Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as “obsolete” or
“obsolescent” and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their
need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor—whereby
the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the
contrary, the bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if
it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense,
has no following and is tartly reminded that “it isn’t in the dictionary”
—although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven
forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the
dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from
the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning
and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were
possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly
renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation—sweeter
than honey and stronger than a lion—the lexicographer was a person
unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him
to create.

Sigismund Smith

LIAR, n. A lawyer with a roving commission.

LIBERTY, n. One of Imagination’s most precious possessions.

Martha Braymance

LICKSPITTLE, n. A useful functionary, not infrequently found editing a
newspaper. In his character of editor he is closely allied to the
blackmailer by the tie of occasional identity; for in truth the
lickspittle is only the blackmailer under another aspect, although the
latter is frequently found as an independent species. Lickspittling is
more detestable than blackmailing, precisely as the business of a
confidence man is more detestable than that of a highway robber; and the
parallel maintains itself throughout, for whereas few robbers will cheat,
every sneak will plunder if he dare.

LIFE, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in
daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed. The
question, “Is life worth living?” has been much discussed; particularly by
those who think it is not, many of whom have written at great length in
support of their view and by careful observance of the laws of health
enjoyed for long terms of years the honors of successful controversy.

Han Soper

LIGHTHOUSE, n. A tall building on the seashore in which the government
maintains a lamp and the friend of a politician.

LIMB, n. The branch of a tree or the leg of an American woman.

B. Percival Dike

LINEN, n. “A kind of cloth the making of which, when made of hemp, entails
a great waste of hemp.”—Calcraft the Hangman.

LITIGANT, n. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining
his bones.

LITIGATION, n. A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a
sausage.

LIVER, n. A large red organ thoughtfully provided by nature to be bilious
with. The sentiments and emotions which every literary anatomist now knows
to haunt the heart were anciently believed to infest the liver; and even
Gascoygne, speaking of the emotional side of human nature, calls it “our
hepaticall parte.” It was at one time considered the seat of life; hence
its name—liver, the thing we live with. The liver is heaven’s best
gift to the goose; without it that bird would be unable to supply us with
the Strasbourg pate.

LL.D. Letters indicating the degree Legumptionorum Doctor, one
learned in laws, gifted with legal gumption. Some suspicion is cast upon
this derivation by the fact that the title was formerly LL.d., and
conferred only upon gentlemen distinguished for their wealth. At the date
of this writing Columbia University is considering the expediency of
making another degree for clergymen, in place of the old D.D.—Damnator
Diaboli. The new honor will be known as Sanctorum Custus, and
written $$c. The name of the Rev. John Satan has been suggested as
a suitable recipient by a lover of consistency, who points out that
Professor Harry Thurston Peck has long enjoyed the advantage of a degree.

LOCK-AND-KEY, n. The distinguishing device of civilization and
enlightenment.

LODGER, n. A less popular name for the Second Person of that delectable
newspaper Trinity, the Roomer, the Bedder, and the Mealer.

LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the
limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of
logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a
conclusion—thus:

Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as
quickly as one man.

Minor Premise: One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds;
therefore—

Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second.

This may be called the syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining
logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.

LOGOMACHY, n. A war in which the weapons are words and the wounds
punctures in the swim-bladder of self-esteem—a kind of contest in
which, the vanquished being unconscious of defeat, the victor is denied
the reward of success.

LONGANIMITY, n. The disposition to endure injury with meek forbearance
while maturing a plan of revenge.

LONGEVITY, n. Uncommon extension of the fear of death.

LOOKING-GLASS, n. A vitreous plane upon which to display a fleeting show
for man’s disillusion given.

The King of Manchuria had a magic looking-glass, whereon whoso looked saw,
not his own image, but only that of the king. A certain courtier who had
long enjoyed the king’s favor and was thereby enriched beyond any other
subject of the realm, said to the king: “Give me, I pray, thy wonderful
mirror, so that when absent out of thine august presence I may yet do
homage before thy visible shadow, prostrating myself night and morning in
the glory of thy benign countenance, as which nothing has so divine
splendor, O Noonday Sun of the Universe!”

Please with the speech, the king commanded that the mirror be conveyed to
the courtier’s palace; but after, having gone thither without apprisal, he
found it in an apartment where was naught but idle lumber. And the mirror
was dimmed with dust and overlaced with cobwebs. This so angered him that
he fisted it hard, shattering the glass, and was sorely hurt. Enraged all
the more by this mischance, he commanded that the ungrateful courtier be
thrown into prison, and that the glass be repaired and taken back to his
own palace; and this was done. But when the king looked again on the
mirror he saw not his image as before, but only the figure of a crowned
ass, having a bloody bandage on one of its hinder hooves—as the
artificers and all who had looked upon it had before discerned but feared
to report. Taught wisdom and charity, the king restored his courtier to
liberty, had the mirror set into the back of the throne and reigned many
years with justice and humility; and one day when he fell asleep in death
while on the throne, the whole court saw in the mirror the luminous figure
of an angel, which remains to this day.

LOQUACITY, n. A disorder which renders the sufferer unable to curb his
tongue when you wish to talk.

LORD, n. In American society, an English tourist above the state of a
costermonger, as, lord ‘Aberdasher, Lord Hartisan and so forth. The
traveling Briton of lesser degree is addressed as “Sir,” as, Sir ‘Arry
Donkiboi, or ‘Amstead ‘Eath. The word “Lord” is sometimes used, also, as a
title of the Supreme Being; but this is thought to be rather flattery than
true reverence.

G.J.

LORE, n. Learning—particularly that sort which is not derived from a
regular course of instruction but comes of the reading of occult books, or
by nature. This latter is commonly designated as folk-lore and embraces
popularly myths and superstitions. In Baring-Gould’s Curious Myths of
the Middle Ages the reader will find many of these traced backward,
through various peoples on converging lines, toward a common origin in
remote antiquity. Among these are the fables of “Teddy the Giant Killer,”
“The Sleeping John Sharp Williams,” “Little Red Riding Hood and the Sugar
Trust,” “Beauty and the Brisbane,” “The Seven Aldermen of Ephesus,” “Rip
Van Fairbanks,” and so forth. The fable which Goethe so affectingly relates
under the title of “The Erl-King” was known two thousand years ago in
Greece as “The Demos and the Infant Industry.” One of the most general and
ancient of these myths is that Arabian tale of “Ali Baba and the Forty
Rockefellers.”

LOSS, n. Privation of that which we had, or had not. Thus, in the latter
sense, it is said of a defeated candidate that he “lost his election”; and
of that eminent man, the poet Gilder, that he has “lost his mind.” It is
in the former and more legitimate sense, that the word is used in the
famous epitaph:

LOVE, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the
patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This
disease, like caries and many other ailments, is prevalent only
among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous
nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its
ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than
to the patient.

LOW-BRED, adj. “Raised” instead of brought up.

LUMINARY, n. One who throws light upon a subject; as an editor by not
writing about it.

LUNARIAN, n. An inhabitant of the moon, as distinguished from Lunatic, one
whom the moon inhabits. The Lunarians have been described by Lucian, Locke
and other observers, but without much agreement. For example, Bragellos
avers their anatomical identity with Man, but Professor Newcomb says they
are more like the hill tribes of Vermont.

LYRE, n. An ancient instrument of torture. The word is now used in a
figurative sense to denote the poetic faculty, as in the following fiery
lines of our great poet, Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

Farquharson Harris

M

MACE, n. A staff of office signifying authority. Its form, that of a heavy
club, indicates its original purpose and use in dissuading from dissent.

MACHINATION, n. The method employed by one’s opponents in baffling one’s
open and honorable efforts to do the right thing.

R.S.K.

MACROBIAN, n. One forgotten of the gods and living to a great age. History
is abundantly supplied with examples, from Methuselah to Old Parr, but
some notable instances of longevity are less well known. A Calabrian
peasant named Coloni, born in 1753, lived so long that he had what he
considered a glimpse of the dawn of universal peace. Scanavius relates
that he knew an archbishop who was so old that he could remember a time
when he did not deserve hanging. In 1566 a linen draper of Bristol,
England, declared that he had lived five hundred years, and that in all
that time he had never told a lie. There are instances of longevity (macrobiosis)
in our own country. Senator Chauncey Depew is old enough to know better.
The editor of The American, a newspaper in New York City, has a
memory that goes back to the time when he was a rascal, but not to the
fact. The President of the United States was born so long ago that many of
the friends of his youth have risen to high political and military
preferment without the assistance of personal merit. The verses following
were written by a macrobian:

Venable Strigg

MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not
conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the
conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short,
unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials
destitute of evidence that themselves are sane. For illustration, this
present (and illustrious) lexicographer is no firmer in the faith of his
own sanity than is any inmate of any madhouse in the land; yet for aught
he knows to the contrary, instead of the lofty occupation that seems to
him to be engaging his powers he may really be beating his hands against
the window bars of an asylum and declaring himself Noah Webster, to the
innocent delight of many thoughtless spectators.

MAGDALENE, n. An inhabitant of Magdala. Popularly, a woman found out. This
definition of the word has the authority of ignorance, Mary of Magdala
being another person than the penitent woman mentioned by St. Luke. It has
also the official sanction of the governments of Great Britain and the
United States. In England the word is pronounced Maudlin, whence maudlin,
adjective, unpleasantly sentimental. With their Maudlin for Magdalene, and
their Bedlam for Bethlehem, the English may justly boast themselves the
greatest of revisers.

MAGIC, n. An art of converting superstition into coin. There are other
arts serving the same high purpose, but the discreet lexicographer does
not name them.

MAGNET, n. Something acted upon by magnetism.

MAGNETISM, n. Something acting upon a magnet.

The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of
one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a
great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.

MAGNIFICENT, adj. Having a grandeur or splendor superior to that to which
the spectator is accustomed, as the ears of an ass, to a rabbit, or the
glory of a glowworm, to a maggot.

MAGNITUDE, n. Size. Magnitude being purely relative, nothing is large and
nothing small. If everything in the universe were increased in bulk one
thousand diameters nothing would be any larger than it was before, but if
one thing remain unchanged all the others would be larger than they had
been. To an understanding familiar with the relativity of magnitude and
distance the spaces and masses of the astronomer would be no more
impressive than those of the microscopist. For anything we know to the
contrary, the visible universe may be a small part of an atom, with its
component ions, floating in the life-fluid (luminiferous ether) of some
animal. Possibly the wee creatures peopling the corpuscles of our own
blood are overcome with the proper emotion when contemplating the
unthinkable distance from one of these to another.

MAGPIE, n. A bird whose thievish disposition suggested to someone that it
might be taught to talk.

MAIDEN, n. A young person of the unfair sex addicted to clewless conduct
and views that madden to crime. The genus has a wide geographical
distribution, being found wherever sought and deplored wherever found. The
maiden is not altogether unpleasing to the eye, nor (without her piano and
her views) insupportable to the ear, though in respect to comeliness
distinctly inferior to the rainbow, and, with regard to the part of her
that is audible, bleaten out of the field by the canary—which,
also, is more portable.

Opoline Jones

MAJESTY, n. The state and title of a king. Regarded with a just contempt
by the Most Eminent Grand Masters, Grand Chancellors, Great Incohonees and
Imperial Potentates of the ancient and honorable orders of republican
America.

MALE, n. A member of the unconsidered, or negligible sex. The male of the
human race is commonly known (to the female) as Mere Man. The genus has
two varieties: good providers and bad providers.

MALEFACTOR, n. The chief factor in the progress of the human race.

MALTHUSIAN, adj. Pertaining to Malthus and his doctrines. Malthus believed
in artificially limiting population, but found that it could not be done
by talking. One of the most practical exponents of the Malthusian idea was
Herod of Judea, though all the famous soldiers have been of the same way
of thinking.

MAMMALIA, n.pl. A family of vertebrate animals whose females in a state of
nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightened put them out
to nurse, or use the bottle.

MAMMON, n. The god of the world’s leading religion. The chief temple is in
the holy city of New York.

Jared Oopf

MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he
is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is
extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however,
multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable
earth and Canada.

Apperton Duke

MANES, n. The immortal parts of dead Greeks and Romans. They were in a
state of dull discomfort until the bodies from which they had exhaled were
buried and burned; and they seem not to have been particularly happy
afterward.

MANICHEISM, n. The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare
between Good and Evil. When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the
victorious Opposition.

MANNA, n. A food miraculously given to the Israelites in the wilderness.
When it was no longer supplied to them they settled down and tilled the
soil, fertilizing it, as a rule, with the bodies of the original
occupants.

MARRIAGE, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master,
a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

MARTYR, n. One who moves along the line of least reluctance to a desired
death.

MATERIAL, adj. Having an actual existence, as distinguished from an
imaginary one. Important.

Jamrach Holobom

MAUSOLEUM, n. The final and funniest folly of the rich.

MAYONNAISE, n. One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a
state religion.

ME, pro. The objectionable case of I. The personal pronoun in English has
three cases, the dominative, the objectionable and the oppressive. Each is
all three.

MEANDER, n. To proceed sinuously and aimlessly. The word is the ancient
name of a river about one hundred and fifty miles south of Troy, which
turned and twisted in the effort to get out of hearing when the Greeks and
Trojans boasted of their prowess.

MEDAL, n. A small metal disk given as a reward for virtues, attainments or
services more or less authentic.

It is related of Bismark, who had been awarded a medal for gallantly
rescuing a drowning person, that, being asked the meaning of the medal, he
replied: “I save lives sometimes.” And sometimes he didn’t.

MEDICINE, n. A stone flung down the Bowery to kill a dog in Broadway.

MEEKNESS, n. Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.

The Biographical Alphabet

MEERSCHAUM, n. (Literally, seafoam, and by many erroneously supposed to be
made of it.) A fine white clay, which for convenience in coloring it brown
is made into tobacco pipes and smoked by the workmen engaged in that
industry. The purpose of coloring it has not been disclosed by the
manufacturers.

Martin Bulstrode

MENDACIOUS, adj. Addicted to rhetoric.

MERCHANT, n. One engaged in a commercial pursuit. A commercial pursuit is
one in which the thing pursued is a dollar.

MERCY, n. An attribute beloved of detected offenders.

MESMERISM, n. Hypnotism before it wore good clothes, kept a carriage and
asked Incredulity to dinner.

METROPOLIS, n. A stronghold of provincialism.

MILLENNIUM, n. The period of a thousand years when the lid is to be
screwed down, with all reformers on the under side.

MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief
activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the
futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but
itself to know itself with. From the Latin mens, a fact unknown to
that honest shoe-seller, who, observing that his learned competitor over
the way had displayed the motto “Mens conscia recti,” emblazoned
his own front with the words “Men’s, women’s and children’s conscia
recti.”

MINE, adj. Belonging to me if I can hold or seize it.

MINISTER, n. An agent of a higher power with a lower responsibility. In
diplomacy an officer sent into a foreign country as the visible
embodiment of his sovereign’s hostility. His principal qualification is a
degree of plausible inveracity next below that of an ambassador.

MINOR, adj. Less objectionable.

MINSTREL, adj. Formerly a poet, singer or musician; now a nigger with a
color less than skin deep and a humor more than flesh and blood can bear.

MIRACLE, n. An act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable,
as beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four aces and a
king.

MISCREANT, n. A person of the highest degree of unworth. Etymologically,
the word means unbeliever, and its present signification may be regarded
as theology’s noblest contribution to the development of our language.

MISDEMEANOR, n. An infraction of the law having less dignity than a felony
and constituting no claim to admittance into the best criminal society.

S.V. Hanipur

MISERICORDE, n. A dagger which in mediaeval warfare was used by the foot
soldier to remind an unhorsed knight that he was mortal.

MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.

MISS, n. The title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that
they are in the market. Miss, Missis (Mrs.) and Mister (Mr.) are the three
most distinctly disagreeable words in the language, in sound and sense.
Two are corruptions of Mistress, the other of Master. In the general
abolition of social titles in this our country they miraculously escaped
to plague us. If we must have them let us be consistent and give one to
the unmarried man. I venture to suggest Mush, abbreviated to Mh.

MOLECULE, n. The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. It is distinguished
from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter, by a
closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of
matter. Three great scientific theories of the structure of the universe
are the molecular, the corpuscular and the atomic. A fourth affirms, with
Haeckel, the condensation of precipitation of matter from ether—whose
existence is proved by the condensation of precipitation. The present
trend of scientific thought is toward the theory of ions. The ion differs
from the molecule, the corpuscle and the atom in that it is an ion. A
fifth theory is held by idiots, but it is doubtful if they know any more
about the matter than the others.

MONAD, n. The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. (See Molecule.)
According to Leibnitz, as nearly as he seems willing to be understood, the
monad has body without bulk, and mind without manifestation—Leibnitz
knows him by the innate power of considering. He has founded upon him a
theory of the universe, which the creature bears without resentment, for
the monad is a gentleman. Small as he is, the monad contains all the
powers and possibilities needful to his evolution into a German
philosopher of the first class —altogether a very capable little
fellow. He is not to be confounded with the microbe, or bacillus; by its
inability to discern him, a good microscope shows him to be of an entirely
distinct species.

MONARCH, n. A person engaged in reigning. Formerly the monarch ruled, as
the derivation of the word attests, and as many subjects have had occasion
to learn. In Russia and the Orient the monarch has still a considerable
influence in public affairs and in the disposition of the human head, but
in western Europe political administration is mostly entrusted to his
ministers, he being somewhat preoccupied with reflections relating to the
status of his own head.

MONARCHICAL GOVERNMENT, n. Government.

MONDAY, n. In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game.

MONEY, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part
with it. An evidence of culture and a passport to polite society.
Supportable property.

MONKEY, n. An arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical
trees.

MONOSYLLABIC, adj. Composed of words of one syllable, for literary babes
who never tire of testifying their delight in the vapid compound by
appropriate googoogling. The words are commonly Saxon—that is to
say, words of a barbarous people destitute of ideas and incapable of any
but the most elementary sentiments and emotions.

Judibras

MONSIGNOR, n. A high ecclesiastical title, of which the Founder of our
religion overlooked the advantages.

MONUMENT, n. A structure intended to commemorate something which either
needs no commemoration or cannot be commemorated.

but Agammemnon’s fame suffers no diminution in consequence. The monument
custom has its reductiones ad absurdum in monuments “to the unknown
dead”—that is to say, monuments to perpetuate the memory of those
who have left no memory.

MORE, adj. The comparative degree of too much.

MOUSE, n. An animal which strews its path with fainting women. As in Rome
Christians were thrown to the lions, so centuries earlier in Otumwee, the
most ancient and famous city of the world, female heretics were thrown to
the mice. Jakak-Zotp, the historian, the only Otumwump whose writings have
descended to us, says that these martyrs met their death with little
dignity and much exertion. He even attempts to exculpate the mice (such is
the malice of bigotry) by declaring that the unfortunate women perished,
some from exhaustion, some of broken necks from falling over their own
feet, and some from lack of restoratives. The mice, he avers, enjoyed the
pleasures of the chase with composure. But if “Roman history is
nine-tenths lying,” we can hardly expect a smaller proportion of that
rhetorical figure in the annals of a people capable of so incredible
cruelty to lovely women; for a hard heart has a false tongue.

MOUSQUETAIRE, n. A long glove covering a part of the arm. Worn in New
Jersey. But “mousquetaire” is a mighty poor way to spell muskeeter.

MOUTH, n. In man, the gateway to the soul; in woman, the outlet of the
heart.

MUGWUMP, n. In politics one afflicted with self-respect and addicted to
the vice of independence. A term of contempt.

MULATTO, n. A child of two races, ashamed of both.

MULTITUDE, n. A crowd; the source of political wisdom and virtue. In a
republic, the object of the statesman’s adoration. “In a multitude of
counsellors there is wisdom,” saith the proverb. If many men of equal
individual wisdom are wiser than any one of them, it must be that they
acquire the excess of wisdom by the mere act of getting together. Whence
comes it? Obviously from nowhere—as well say that a range of
mountains is higher than the single mountains composing it. A multitude is
as wise as its wisest member if it obey him; if not, it is no wiser than
its most foolish.

MUMMY, n. An ancient Egyptian, formerly in universal use among modern
civilized nations as medicine, and now engaged in supplying art with an
excellent pigment. He is handy, too, in museums in gratifying the vulgar
curiosity that serves to distinguish man from the lower animals.

Scopas Brune

MUSTANG, n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society,
the American wife of an English nobleman.

MYRMIDON, n. A follower of Achilles—particularly when he didn’t
lead.

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people’s beliefs concerning its
origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from
the true accounts which it invents later.

N

NECTAR, n. A drink served at banquets of the Olympian deities. The secret
of its preparation is lost, but the modern Kentuckians believe that they
come pretty near to a knowledge of its chief ingredient.

J.G.

NEGRO, n. The piece de resistance in the American political
problem. Representing him by the letter n, the Republicans begin to build
their equation thus: “Let n = the white man.” This, however, appears to
give an unsatisfactory solution.

NEIGHBOR, n. One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does
all he knows how to make us disobedient.

NEPOTISM, n. Appointing your grandmother to office for the good of the
party.

NEWTONIAN, adj. Pertaining to a philosophy of the universe invented by
Newton, who discovered that an apple will fall to the ground, but was
unable to say why. His successors and disciples have advanced so far as to
be able to say when.

NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi.
The leader of the school is Tolstoi.

NIRVANA, n. In the Buddhist religion, a state of pleasurable annihilation
awarded to the wise, particularly to those wise enough to understand it.

NOBLEMAN, n. Nature’s provision for wealthy American minds ambitious to
incur social distinction and suffer high life.

NOISE, n. A stench in the ear. Undomesticated music. The chief product and
authenticating sign of civilization.

NOMINATE, v. To designate for the heaviest political assessment. To put
forward a suitable person to incur the mudgobbing and deadcatting of the
opposition.

NOMINEE, n. A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private
life and diligently seeking the honorable obscurity of public office.

NON-COMBATANT, n. A dead Quaker.

NONSENSE, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent
dictionary.

NOSE, n. The extreme outpost of the face. From the circumstance that great
conquerors have great noses, Getius, whose writings antedate the age of
humor, calls the nose the organ of quell. It has been observed that one’s
nose is never so happy as when thrust into the affairs of others, from
which some physiologists have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid
of the sense of smell.

Arpad Singiny

NOTORIETY, n. The fame of one’s competitor for public honors. The kind of
renown most accessible and acceptable to mediocrity. A Jacob’s-ladder
leading to the vaudeville stage, with angels ascending and descending.

NOUMENON, n. That which exists, as distinguished from that which merely
seems to exist, the latter being a phenomenon. The noumenon is a bit
difficult to locate; it can be apprehended only be a process of reasoning—which
is a phenomenon. Nevertheless, the discovery and exposition of noumena
offer a rich field for what Lewes calls “the endless variety and
excitement of philosophic thought.” Hurrah (therefore) for the noumenon!

NOVEL, n. A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same
relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long
to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are
successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is
impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in
mind is the mere plot of what has gone before. To the romance the novel is
what photography is to painting. Its distinguishing principle,
probability, corresponds to the literal actuality of the photograph and
puts it distinctly into the category of reporting; whereas the free wing
of the romancer enables him to mount to such altitudes of imagination as
he may be fitted to attain; and the first three essentials of the literary
art are imagination, imagination and imagination. The art of writing
novels, such as it was, is long dead everywhere except in Russia, where it
is new. Peace to its ashes—some of which have a large sale.

NOVEMBER, n. The eleventh twelfth of a weariness.

O

OATH, n. In law, a solemn appeal to the Deity, made binding upon the
conscience by a penalty for perjury.

OBLIVION, n. The state or condition in which the wicked cease from
struggling and the dreary are at rest. Fame’s eternal dumping ground. Cold
storage for high hopes. A place where ambitious authors meet their works
without pride and their betters without envy. A dormitory without an alarm
clock.

OBSERVATORY, n. A place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of
their predecessors.

OBSESSED, p.p. Vexed by an evil spirit, like the Gadarene swine and other
critics. Obsession was once more common than it is now. Arasthus tells of
a peasant who was occupied by a different devil for every day in the week,
and on Sundays by two. They were frequently seen, always walking in his
shadow, when he had one, but were finally driven away by the village
notary, a holy man; but they took the peasant with them, for he vanished
utterly. A devil thrown out of a woman by the Archbishop of Rheims ran
through the trees, pursued by a hundred persons, until the open country
was reached, where by a leap higher than a church spire he escaped into a
bird. A chaplain in Cromwell’s army exorcised a soldier’s obsessing devil
by throwing the soldier into the water, when the devil came to the
surface. The soldier, unfortunately, did not.

OBSOLETE, adj. No longer used by the timid. Said chiefly of words. A word
which some lexicographer has marked obsolete is ever thereafter an object
of dread and loathing to the fool writer, but if it is a good word and has
no exact modern equivalent equally good, it is good enough for the good
writer. Indeed, a writer’s attitude toward “obsolete” words is as true a
measure of his literary ability as anything except the character of his
work. A dictionary of obsolete and obsolescent words would not only be
singularly rich in strong and sweet parts of speech; it would add large
possessions to the vocabulary of every competent writer who might not
happen to be a competent reader.

OBSTINATE, adj. Inaccessible to the truth as it is manifest in the
splendor and stress of our advocacy.

The popular type and exponent of obstinacy is the mule, a most intelligent
animal.

OCCASIONAL, adj. Afflicting us with greater or less frequency. That,
however, is not the sense in which the word is used in the phrase
“occasional verses,” which are verses written for an “occasion,” such as
an anniversary, a celebration or other event. True, they afflict us a
little worse than other sorts of verse, but their name has no reference to
irregular recurrence.

OCCIDENT, n. The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It
is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful subtribe of the Hypocrites,
whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased
to call “war” and “commerce.” These, also, are the principal industries of
the Orient.

OCEAN, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for
man—who has no gills.

OFFENSIVE, adj. Generating disagreeable emotions or sensations, as the
advance of an army against its enemy.

“Were the enemy’s tactics offensive?” the king asked. “I should say so!”
replied the unsuccessful general. “The blackguard wouldn’t come out of his
works!”

OLD, adj. In that stage of usefulness which is not inconsistent with
general inefficiency, as an old man. Discredited by lapse of time
and offensive to the popular taste, as an old book.

Harley Shum

OLEAGINOUS, adj. Oily, smooth, sleek.

Disraeli once described the manner of Bishop Wilberforce as “unctuous,
oleaginous, saponaceous.” And the good prelate was ever afterward known as
Soapy Sam. For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would
stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.

OLYMPIAN, adj. Relating to a mountain in Thessaly, once inhabited by gods,
now a repository of yellowing newspapers, beer bottles and mutilated
sardine cans, attesting the presence of the tourist and his appetite.

Averil Joop

OMEN, n. A sign that something will happen if nothing happens.

ONCE, adv. Enough.

OPERA, n. A play representing life in another world, whose inhabitants
have no speech but song, no motions but gestures and no postures but
attitudes. All acting is simulation, and the word simulation is
from simia, an ape; but in opera the actor takes for his model Simia
audibilis (or Pithecanthropos stentor)—the ape that
howls.

OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the
jail yard.

OPPORTUNITY, n. A favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment.

OPPOSE, v. To assist with obstructions and objections.

Percy P. Orminder

OPPOSITION, n. In politics the party that prevents the Government from
running amuck by hamstringing it.

The King of Ghargaroo, who had been abroad to study the science of
government, appointed one hundred of his fattest subjects as members of a
parliament to make laws for the collection of revenue. Forty of these he
named the Party of Opposition and had his Prime Minister carefully
instruct them in their duty of opposing every royal measure. Nevertheless,
the first one that was submitted passed unanimously. Greatly displeased,
the King vetoed it, informing the Opposition that if they did that again
they would pay for their obstinacy with their heads. The entire forty
promptly disemboweled themselves.

“What shall we do now?” the King asked. “Liberal institutions cannot be
maintained without a party of Opposition.”

“Splendor of the universe,” replied the Prime Minister, “it is true these
dogs of darkness have no longer their credentials, but all is not lost.
Leave the matter to this worm of the dust.”

So the Minister had the bodies of his Majesty’s Opposition embalmed and
stuffed with straw, put back into the seats of power and nailed there.
Forty votes were recorded against every bill and the nation prospered. But
one day a bill imposing a tax on warts was defeated—the members of
the Government party had not been nailed to their seats! This so enraged
the King that the Prime Minister was put to death, the parliament was
dissolved with a battery of artillery, and government of the people, by
the people, for the people perished from Ghargaroo.

OPTIMISM, n. The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful,
including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and
everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those
most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and is most
acceptably expounded with the grin that apes a smile. Being a blind faith,
it is inaccessible to the light of disproof—an intellectual
disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but
fortunately not contagious.

OPTIMIST, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.

A pessimist applied to God for relief.

“Ah, you wish me to restore your hope and cheerfulness,” said God.

“No,” replied the petitioner, “I wish you to create something that would
justify them.”

“The world is all created,” said God, “but you have overlooked something—the
mortality of the optimist.”

ORATORY, n. A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the
understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography.

ORPHAN, n. A living person whom death has deprived of the power of filial
ingratitude—a privation appealing with a particular eloquence to all
that is sympathetic in human nature. When young the orphan is commonly
sent to an asylum, where by careful cultivation of its rudimentary sense
of locality it is taught to know its place. It is then instructed in the
arts of dependence and servitude and eventually turned loose to prey upon
the world as a bootblack or scullery maid.

ORTHODOX, n. An ox wearing the popular religious yoke.

ORTHOGRAPHY, n. The science of spelling by the eye instead of the ear.
Advocated with more heat than light by the outmates of every asylum for
the insane. They have had to concede a few things since the time of
Chaucer, but are none the less hot in defence of those to be conceded
hereafter.

OSTRICH, n. A large bird to which (for its sins, doubtless) nature has
denied that hinder toe in which so many pious naturalists have seen a
conspicuous evidence of design. The absence of a good working pair of
wings is no defect, for, as has been ingeniously pointed out, the ostrich
does not fly.

OTHERWISE, adv. No better.

OUTCOME, n. A particular type of disappointment. By the kind of
intelligence that sees in an exception a proof of the rule the wisdom of
an act is judged by the outcome, the result. This is immortal nonsense;
the wisdom of an act is to be judged by the light that the doer had when he
performed it.

OUTDO, v.t. To make an enemy.

OUT-OF-DOORS, n. That part of one’s environment upon which no government
has been able to collect taxes. Chiefly useful to inspire poets.

Stromboli Smith

OVATION, n. In ancient Rome, a definite, formal pageant in honor of one who
had been disserviceable to the enemies of the nation. A lesser “triumph.”
In modern English the word is improperly used to signify any loose and
spontaneous expression of popular homage to the hero of the hour and
place.

Dudley Spink

OVEREAT, v. To dine.

John Boop

OVERWORK, n. A dangerous disorder affecting high public functionaries who
want to go fishing.

OWE, v. To have (and to hold) a debt. The word formerly signified not
indebtedness, but possession; it meant “own,” and in the minds of debtors
there is still a good deal of confusion between assets and liabilities.

OYSTER, n. A slimy, gobby shellfish which civilization gives men the
hardihood to eat without removing its entrails! The shells are sometimes
given to the poor.

P

PAIN, n. An uncomfortable frame of mind that may have a physical basis in
something that is being done to the body, or may be purely mental, caused
by the good fortune of another.

PAINTING, n. The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and
exposing them to the critic.

Formerly, painting and sculpture were combined in the same work: the
ancients painted their statues. The only present alliance between the two
arts is that the modern painter chisels his patrons.

PALACE, n. A fine and costly residence, particularly that of a great
official. The residence of a high dignitary of the Christian Church is
called a palace; that of the Founder of his religion was known as a field,
or wayside. There is progress.

PALM, n. A species of tree having several varieties, of which the familiar
“itching palm” (Palma hominis) is most widely distributed and
sedulously cultivated. This noble vegetable exudes a kind of invisible
gum, which may be detected by applying to the bark a piece of gold or
silver. The metal will adhere with remarkable tenacity. The fruit of the
itching palm is so bitter and unsatisfying that a considerable percentage
of it is sometimes given away in what are known as “benefactions.”

PALMISTRY, n. The 947th method (according to Mimbleshaw’s classification)
of obtaining money by false pretences. It consists in “reading character”
in the wrinkles made by closing the hand. The pretence is not altogether
false; character can really be read very accurately in this way, for the
wrinkles in every hand submitted plainly spell the word “dupe.” The
imposture consists in not reading it aloud.

PANDEMONIUM, n. Literally, the Place of All the Demons. Most of them have
escaped into politics and finance, and the place is now used as a lecture
hall by the Audible Reformer. When disturbed by his voice the ancient
echoes clamor appropriate responses most gratifying to his pride of
distinction.

PANTALOONS, n. A nether habiliment of the adult civilized male. The
garment is tubular and unprovided with hinges at the points of flexion.
Supposed to have been invented by a humorist. Called “trousers” by the
enlightened and “pants” by the unworthy.

PANTHEISM, n. The doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to
the doctrine that God is everything.

PANTOMIME, n. A play in which the story is told without violence to the
language. The least disagreeable form of dramatic action.

PARDON, v. To remit a penalty and restore to the life of crime. To add to
the lure of crime the temptation of ingratitude.

PASSPORT, n. A document treacherously inflicted upon a citizen going
abroad, exposing him as an alien and pointing him out for special
reprobation and outrage.

PAST, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a
slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present
parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand
divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other,
are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the
other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the
Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth
and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope
flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of
ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of
to-morrow. They are one—the knowledge and the dream.

PASTIME, n. A device for promoting dejection. Gentle exercise for
intellectual debility.

PATIENCE, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

PATRIOT, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of
the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.

PATRIOTISM, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious
to illuminate his name.

In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last
resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior
lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

PEACE, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two
periods of fighting.

Ro Amil

PEDESTRIAN, n. The variable (an audible) part of the roadway for an
automobile.

PEDIGREE, n. The known part of the route from an arboreal ancestor with a
swim bladder to an urban descendant with a cigarette.

PENITENT, adj. Undergoing or awaiting punishment.

PERFECTION, n. An imaginary state of quality distinguished from the actual
by an element known as excellence; an attribute of the critic.

The editor of an English magazine having received a letter pointing out
the erroneous nature of his views and style, and signed “Perfection,”
promptly wrote at the foot of the letter: “I don’t agree with you,” and
mailed it to Matthew Arnold.

PERIPATETIC, adj. Walking about. Relating to the philosophy of Aristotle,
who, while expounding it, moved from place to place in order to avoid his
pupil’s objections. A needless precaution—they knew no more of the
matter than he.

PERORATION, n. The explosion of an oratorical rocket. It dazzles, but to
an observer having the wrong kind of nose its most conspicuous peculiarity
is the smell of the several kinds of powder used in preparing it.

PERSEVERANCE, n. A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious
success.

Sukker Uffro

PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by
the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and
his unsightly smile.

PHILANTHROPIST, n. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained
himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.

PHILISTINE, n. One whose mind is the creature of its environment,
following the fashion in thought, feeling and sentiment. He is sometimes
learned, frequently prosperous, commonly clean and always solemn.

PHILOSOPHY, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

PHOENIX, n. The classical prototype of the modern “small hot bird.”

PHONOGRAPH, n. An irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.

PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It
is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite so good as
that of a Cheyenne.

PHRENOLOGY, n. The science of picking the pocket through the scalp. It
consists in locating and exploiting the organ that one is a dupe with.

PHYSICIAN, n. One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when
well.

PHYSIOGNOMY, n. The art of determining the character of another by the
resemblances and differences between his face and our own, which is the
standard of excellence.

Lavatar Shunk

PIANO, n. A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is
operated by depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the
audience.

PICKANINNY, n. The young of the Procyanthropos, or Americanus
dominans. It is small, black and charged with political fatalities.

PICTURE, n. A representation in two dimensions of something wearisome in
three.

Jali Hane

PIE, n. An advance agent of the reaper whose name is Indigestion.

Rev. Dr. Mucker

(in a funeral sermon over a British nobleman)

(from the headstone of a British nobleman in Kalamazoo)

PIETY, n. Reverence for the Supreme Being, based upon His supposed
resemblance to man.

Judibras

PIG, n. An animal (Porcus omnivorus) closely allied to the human
race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is
inferior in scope, for it sticks at pig.

PIGMY, n. One of a tribe of very small men found by ancient travelers in
many parts of the world, but by modern in Central Africa only. The Pigmies
are so called to distinguish them from the bulkier Caucasians —who
are Hogmies.

PILGRIM, n. A traveler that is taken seriously. A Pilgrim Father was one
who, leaving Europe in 1620 because not permitted to sing psalms through
his nose, followed it to Massachusetts, where he could personate God
according to the dictates of his conscience.

PILLORY, n. A mechanical device for inflicting personal distinction
—prototype of the modern newspaper conducted by persons of austere
virtues and blameless lives.

PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.

PITIFUL, adj. The state of an enemy or opponent after an imaginary
encounter with oneself.

PITY, n. A failing sense of exemption, inspired by contrast.

PLAGIARISM, n. A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable
priority and an honorable subsequence.

PLAGIARIZE, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has
never, never read.

PLAGUE, n. In ancient times a general punishment of the innocent for
admonition of their ruler, as in the familiar instance of Pharaoh the
Immune. The plague as we of to-day have the happiness to know it is merely
Nature’s fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.

PLAN, v.t. To bother about the best method of accomplishing an accidental
result.

PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular
literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a
million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in
artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a
departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-mortality. The Pope’s-nose of a
featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of
thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram.

PLATONIC, adj. Pertaining to the philosophy of Socrates. Platonic Love is
a fool’s name for the affection between a disability and a frost.

PLAUDITS, n. Coins with which the populace pays those who tickle and
devour it.

PLEASE, v. To lay the foundation for a superstructure of imposition.

PLEASURE, n. The least hateful form of dejection.

PLEBEIAN, n. An ancient Roman who in the blood of his country stained
nothing but his hands. Distinguished from the Patrician, who was a
saturated solution.

PLEBISCITE, n. A popular vote to ascertain the will of the sovereign.

PLENIPOTENTIARY, adj. Having full power. A Minister Plenipotentiary is a
diplomatist possessing absolute authority on condition that he never exert
it.

PLEONASM, n. An army of words escorting a corporal of thought.

PLOW, n. An implement that cries aloud for hands accustomed to the pen.

PLUNDER, v. To take the property of another without observing the decent
and customary reticences of theft. To effect a change of ownership with
the candid concomitance of a brass band. To wrest the wealth of A from B
and leave C lamenting a vanished opportunity.

POCKET, n. The cradle of motive and the grave of conscience. In woman this
organ is lacking; so she acts without motive, and her conscience, denied
burial, remains ever alive, confessing the sins of others.

POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines.

POKER, n. A game said to be played with cards for some purpose to this
lexicographer unknown.

POLICE, n. An armed force for protection and participation.

POLITENESS, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.

POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of
principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure
of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation
of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the
statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

POLYGAMY, n. A house of atonement, or expiatory chapel, fitted with
several stools of repentance, as distinguished from monogamy, which has
but one.

POPULIST, n. A fossil patriot of the early agricultural period, found in
the old red soapstone underlying Kansas; characterized by an uncommon
spread of ear, which some naturalists contend gave him the power of
flight, though Professors Morse and Whitney, pursuing independent lines of
thought, have ingeniously pointed out that had he possessed it he would
have gone elsewhere. In the picturesque speech of his period, some
fragments of which have come down to us, he was known as “The Matter with
Kansas.”

PORTABLE, adj. Exposed to a mutable ownership through vicissitudes of
possession.

Worgum Slupsky

PORTUGUESE, n.pl. A species of geese indigenous to Portugal. They are
mostly without feathers and imperfectly edible, even when stuffed with
garlic.

POSITIVE, adj. Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

POSITIVISM, n. A philosophy that denies our knowledge of the Real and
affirms our ignorance of the Apparent. Its longest exponent is Comte, its
broadest Mill and its thickest Spencer.

POSTERITY, n. An appellate court which reverses the judgment of a popular
author’s contemporaries, the appellant being his obscure competitor.

POTABLE, n. Suitable for drinking. Water is said to be potable; indeed,
some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find it palatable
only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as thirst, for which
it is a medicine. Upon nothing has so great and diligent ingenuity been
brought to bear in all ages and in all countries, except the most
uncivilized, as upon the invention of substitutes for water. To hold that
this general aversion to that liquid has no basis in the preservative
instinct of the race is to be unscientific—and without science we
are as the snakes and toads.

POVERTY, n. A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. The
number of plans for its abolition equals that of the reformers who suffer
from it, plus that of the philosophers who know nothing about it. Its
victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their
faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they
believe these to be unknown.

PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a
single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

PRE-ADAMITE, n. One of an experimental and apparently unsatisfactory race
of antedated Creation and lived under conditions not easily conceived.
Melsius believed them to have inhabited “the Void” and to have been
something intermediate between fishes and birds. Little is known of them
beyond the fact that they supplied Cain with a wife and theologians with a
controversy.

PRECEDENT, n. In Law, a previous decision, rule or practice which, in the
absence of a definite statute, has whatever force and authority a Judge
may choose to give it, thereby greatly simplifying his task of doing as he
pleases. As there are precedents for everything, he has only to ignore
those that make against his interest and accentuate those in the line of
his desire. Invention of the precedent elevates the trial-at-law from the
low estate of a fortuitous ordeal to the noble attitude of a dirigible
arbitrament.

PRECIPITATE, adj. Anteprandial.

Judibras

PREDESTINATION, n. The doctrine that all things occur according to
programme. This doctrine should not be confused with that of
foreordination, which means that all things are programmed, but does not
affirm their occurrence, that being only an implication from other
doctrines by which this is entailed. The difference is great enough to
have deluged Christendom with ink, to say nothing of the gore. With the
distinction of the two doctrines kept well in mind, and a reverent belief
in both, one may hope to escape perdition if spared.

PREDICAMENT, n. The wage of consistency.

PREDILECTION, n. The preparatory stage of disillusion.

PRE-EXISTENCE, n. An unnoted factor in creation.

PREFERENCE, n. A sentiment, or frame of mind, induced by the erroneous
belief that one thing is better than another.

An ancient philosopher, expounding his conviction that life is no better
than death, was asked by a disciple why, then, he did not die. “Because,”
he replied, “death is no better than life.”

It is longer.

PREHISTORIC, adj. Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating
the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.

Orpheus Bowen

PREJUDICE, n. A vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

PRELATE, n. A church officer having a superior degree of holiness and a
fat preferment. One of Heaven’s aristocracy. A gentleman of God.

PREROGATIVE, n. A sovereign’s right to do wrong.

PRESBYTERIAN, n. One who holds the conviction that the government
authorities of the Church should be called presbyters.

PRESCRIPTION, n. A physician’s guess at what will best prolong the
situation with least harm to the patient.

PRESENT, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment
from the realm of hope.

PRESENTABLE, adj. Hideously appareled after the manner of the time and
place.

In Boorioboola-Gha a man is presentable on occasions of ceremony if he
have his abdomen painted a bright blue and wear a cow’s tail; in New York
he may, if it please him, omit the paint, but after sunset he must wear
two tails made of the wool of a sheep and dyed black.

PRESIDE, v. To guide the action of a deliberative body to a desirable
result. In Journalese, to perform upon a musical instrument; as, “He
presided at the piccolo.”

Orpheus Bowen

PRESIDENCY, n. The greased pig in the field game of American politics.

PRESIDENT, n. The leading figure in a small group of men of whom—
and of whom only—it is positively known that immense numbers of
their countrymen did not want any of them for President.

Jonathan Fomry

PREVARICATOR, n. A liar in the caterpillar state.

PRICE, n. Value, plus a reasonable sum for the wear and tear of conscience
in demanding it.

PRIMATE, n. The head of a church, especially a State church supported by
involuntary contributions. The Primate of England is the Archbishop of
Canterbury, an amiable old gentleman, who occupies Lambeth Palace when
living and Westminster Abbey when dead. He is commonly dead.

PRISON, n. A place of punishments and rewards. The poet assures us that—

but a combination of the stone wall, the political parasite and the moral
instructor is no garden of sweets.

PRIVATE, n. A military gentleman with a field-marshal’s baton in his
knapsack and an impediment in his hope.

PROBOSCIS, n. The rudimentary organ of an elephant which serves him in
place of the knife-and-fork that Evolution has as yet denied him. For
purposes of humor it is popularly called a trunk.

Asked how he knew that an elephant was going on a journey, the illustrious
Jo. Miller cast a reproachful look upon his tormentor, and answered,
absently: “When it is ajar,” and threw himself from a high promontory into
the sea. Thus perished in his pride the most famous humorist of antiquity,
leaving to mankind a heritage of woe! No successor worthy of the title has
appeared, though Mr. Edward Bok, of The Ladies’ Home Journal, is
much respected for the purity and sweetness of his personal character.

PROJECTILE, n. The final arbiter in international disputes. Formerly these
disputes were settled by physical contact of the disputants, with such
simple arguments as the rudimentary logic of the times could supply—the
sword, the spear, and so forth. With the growth of prudence in military
affairs the projectile came more and more into favor, and is now held in
high esteem by the most courageous. Its capital defect is that it requires
personal attendance at the point of propulsion.

PROOF, n. Evidence having a shade more of plausibility than of
unlikelihood. The testimony of two credible witnesses as opposed to that
of only one.

PROOF-READER, n. A malefactor who atones for making your writing nonsense
by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.

PROPERTY, n. Any material thing, having no particular value, that may be
held by A against the cupidity of B. Whatever gratifies the passion for
possession in one and disappoints it in all others. The object of man’s
brief rapacity and long indifference.

PROPHECY, n. The art and practice of selling one’s credibility for future
delivery.

PROSPECT, n. An outlook, usually forbidding. An expectation, usually
forbidden.

Bishop Sheber

PROVIDENTIAL, adj. Unexpectedly and conspicuously beneficial to the person
so describing it.

PRUDE, n. A bawd hiding behind the back of her demeanor.

PUBLISH, n. In literary affairs, to become the fundamental element in a
cone of critics.

PUSH, n. One of the two things mainly conducive to success, especially in
politics. The other is Pull.

PYRRHONISM, n. An ancient philosophy, named for its inventor. It consisted
of an absolute disbelief in everything but Pyrrhonism. Its modern
professors have added that.

Q

QUEEN, n. A woman by whom the realm is ruled when there is a king, and
through whom it is ruled when there is not.

QUILL, n. An implement of torture yielded by a goose and commonly wielded
by an ass. This use of the quill is now obsolete, but its modern
equivalent, the steel pen, is wielded by the same everlasting Presence.

QUIVER, n. A portable sheath in which the ancient statesman and the
aboriginal lawyer carried their lighter arguments.

Oglum P. Boomp

QUIXOTIC, adj. Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the
beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied
to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman’s name is
pronounced Ke-ho-tay.

Juan Smith

QUORUM, n. A sufficient number of members of a deliberative body to have
their own way and their own way of having it. In the United States Senate
a quorum consists of the chairman of the Committee on Finance and a
messenger from the White House; in the House of Representatives, of the
Speaker and the devil.

QUOTATION, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The
words erroneously repeated.

Stumpo Gaker

QUOTIENT, n. A number showing how many times a sum of money belonging to
one person is contained in the pocket of another—usually about as
many times as it can be got there.

R

RABBLE, n. In a republic, those who exercise a supreme authority tempered
by fraudulent elections. The rabble is like the sacred Simurgh, of Arabian
fable—omnipotent on condition that it do nothing. (The word is
Aristocratese, and has no exact equivalent in our tongue, but means, as
nearly as may be, “soaring swine.”)

RACK, n. An argumentative implement formerly much used in persuading
devotees of a false faith to embrace the living truth. As a call to the
unconverted the rack never had any particular efficacy, and is now held in
light popular esteem.

RANK, n. Relative elevation in the scale of human worth.

Aramis Jukes

RANSOM, n. The purchase of that which neither belongs to the seller, nor
can belong to the buyer. The most unprofitable of investments.

RAPACITY, n. Providence without industry. The thrift of power.

RAREBIT, n. A Welsh rabbit, in the speech of the humorless, who point out
that it is not a rabbit. To whom it may be solemnly explained that the
comestible known as toad-in-a-hole is really not a toad, and that riz-de-veau
a la financiere is not the smile of a calf prepared after the recipe
of a she banker.

RASCAL, n. A fool considered under another aspect.

RASCALITY, n. Stupidity militant. The activity of a clouded intellect.

RASH, adj. Insensible to the value of our advice.

Bootle P. Gish

RATIONAL, adj. Devoid of all delusions save those of observation,
experience and reflection.

RATTLESNAKE, n. Our prostrate brother, Homo ventrambulans.

RAZOR, n. An instrument used by the Caucasian to enhance his beauty, by
the Mongolian to make a guy of himself, and by the Afro-American to affirm
his worth.

REACH, n. The radius of action of the human hand. The area within which it
is possible (and customary) to gratify directly the propensity to provide.

G.J.

READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it
consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in “dialect” and
humor in slang.

Jupiter Muke

RADICALISM, n. The conservatism of to-morrow injected into the affairs of
to-day.

RADIUM, n. A mineral that gives off heat and stimulates the organ that a
scientist is a fool with.

RAILROAD, n. The chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away
from where we are to where we are no better off. For this purpose the
railroad is held in highest favor by the optimist, for it permits him to
make the transit with great expedition.

RAMSHACKLE, adj. Pertaining to a certain order of architecture, otherwise
known as the Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United
States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects
preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington
are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorians. They are
exceedingly fine and cost one hundred dollars a brick.

REALISM, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm
suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a
measuring-worm.

REALITY, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the
cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.

REALLY, adv. Apparently.

REAR, n. In American military matters, that exposed part of the army that
is nearest to Congress.

REASON, v.i. To weigh probabilities in the scales of desire.

REASON, n. Propensitate of prejudice.

REASONABLE, adj. Accessible to the infection of our own opinions.
Hospitable to persuasion, dissuasion and evasion.

REBEL, n. A proponent of a new misrule who has failed to establish it.

RECOLLECT, v. To recall with additions something not previously known.

RECONCILIATION, n. A suspension of hostilities. An armed truce for the
purpose of digging up the dead.

RECONSIDER, v. To seek a justification for a decision already made.

RECOUNT, n. In American politics, another throw of the dice, accorded to
the player against whom they are loaded.

RECREATION, n. A particular kind of dejection to relieve a general
fatigue.

RECRUIT, n. A person distinguishable from a civilian by his uniform and
from a soldier by his gait.

Thompson Johnson

RECTOR, n. In the Church of England, the Third Person of the parochial
Trinity, the Curate and the Vicar being the other two.

REDEMPTION, n. Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin,
through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned. The doctrine
of Redemption is the fundamental mystery of our holy religion, and whoso
believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to
try to understand it.

Golgo Brone

REDRESS, n. Reparation without satisfaction.

Among the Anglo-Saxon a subject conceiving himself wronged by the king was
permitted, on proving his injury, to beat a brazen image of the royal
offender with a switch that was afterward applied to his own naked back.
The latter rite was performed by the public hangman, and it assured
moderation in the plaintiff’s choice of a switch.

RED-SKIN, n. A North American Indian, whose skin is not red—at least
not on the outside.

REDUNDANT, adj. Superfluous; needless; de trop.

Habeeb Suleiman

Theodore Roosevelt

REFERENDUM, n. A law for submission of proposed legislation to a popular
vote to learn the nonsensus of public opinion.

REFLECTION, n. An action of the mind whereby we obtain a clearer view of
our relation to the things of yesterday and are able to avoid the perils
that we shall not again encounter.

REFORM, v. A thing that mostly satisfies reformers opposed to reformation.

REFUGE, n. Anything assuring protection to one in peril. Moses and Joshua
provided six cities of refuge—Bezer, Golan, Ramoth, Kadesh, Schekem
and Hebron—to which one who had taken life inadvertently could flee
when hunted by relatives of the deceased. This admirable expedient
supplied him with wholesome exercise and enabled them to enjoy the
pleasures of the chase; whereby the soul of the dead man was appropriately
honored by observances akin to the funeral games of early Greece.

REFUSAL, n. Denial of something desired; as an elderly maiden’s hand in
marriage, to a rich and handsome suitor; a valuable franchise to a rich
corporation, by an alderman; absolution to an impenitent king, by a
priest, and so forth. Refusals are graded in a descending scale of
finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal conditional, the refusal
tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by some casuists
the refusal assentive.

REGALIA, n. Distinguishing insignia, jewels and costume of such ancient
and honorable orders as Knights of Adam; Visionaries of Detectable Bosh;
the Ancient Order of Modern Troglodytes; the League of Holy Humbug; the
Golden Phalanx of Phalangers; the Genteel Society of Expurgated Hoodlums;
the Mystic Alliances of Gorgeous Regalians; Knights and Ladies of the
Yellow Dog; the Oriental Order of Sons of the West; the Blatherhood of
Insufferable Stuff; Warriors of the Long Bow; Guardians of the Great Horn
Spoon; the Band of Brutes; the Impenitent Order of Wife-Beaters; the
Sublime Legion of Flamboyant Conspicuants; Worshipers at the Electroplated
Shrine; Shining Inaccessibles; Fee-Faw-Fummers of the Inimitable Grip;
Jannissaries of the Broad-Blown Peacock; Plumed Increscencies of the Magic
Temple; the Grand Cabal of Able-Bodied Sedentarians; Associated Deities of
the Butter Trade; the Garden of Galoots; the Affectionate Fraternity of
Men Similarly Warted; the Flashing Astonishers; Ladies of Horror;
Cooperative Association for Breaking into the Spotlight; Dukes of Eden;
Disciples Militant of the Hidden Faith; Knights-Champions of the Domestic
Dog; the Holy Gregarians; the Resolute Optimists; the Ancient Sodality of
Inhospitable Hogs; Associated Sovereigns of Mendacity; Dukes-Guardian of
the Mystic Cess-Pool; the Society for Prevention of Prevalence; Kings of
Drink; Polite Federation of Gents-Consequential; the Mysterious Order of
the Undecipherable Scroll; Uniformed Rank of Lousy Cats; Monarchs of Worth
and Hunger; Sons of the South Star; Prelates of the Tub-and-Sword.

RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the
nature of the Unknowable.

RELIQUARY, n. A receptacle for such sacred objects as pieces of the true
cross, short-ribs of the saints, the ears of Balaam’s ass, the lung of the
cock that called Peter to repentance and so forth. Reliquaries are
commonly of metal, and provided with a lock to prevent the contents from
coming out and performing miracles at unseasonable times. A feather from
the wing of the Angel of the Annunciation once escaped during a sermon in
Saint Peter’s and so tickled the noses of the congregation that they woke
and sneezed with great vehemence three times each. It is related in the
“Gesta Sanctorum” that a sacristan in the Canterbury cathedral surprised
the head of Saint Dennis in the library. Reprimanded by its stern
custodian, it explained that it was seeking a body of doctrine. This
unseemly levity so raged the diocesan that the offender was publicly
anathematized, thrown into the Stour and replaced by another head of Saint
Dennis, brought from Rome.

RENOWN, n. A degree of distinction between notoriety and fame—a
little more supportable than the one and a little more intolerable than
the other. Sometimes it is conferred by an unfriendly and inconsiderate
hand.

W.J. Candleton

REPARATION, n. Satisfaction that is made for a wrong and deducted from the
satisfaction felt in committing it.

REPARTEE, n. Prudent insult in retort. Practiced by gentlemen with a
constitutional aversion to violence, but a strong disposition to offend.
In a war of words, the tactics of the North American Indian.

REPENTANCE, n. The faithful attendant and follower of Punishment. It is
usually manifest in a degree of reformation that is not inconsistent with
continuity of sin.

Jomater Abemy

REPLICA, n. A reproduction of a work of art, by the artist that made the
original. It is so called to distinguish it from a “copy,” which is made
by another artist. When the two are made with equal skill the replica is
the more valuable, for it is supposed to be more beautiful than it looks.

REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with
a tempest of words.

Barson Maith

REPOSE, v.i. To cease from troubling.

REPRESENTATIVE, n. In national politics, a member of the Lower House in
this world, and without discernible hope of promotion in the next.

REPROBATION, n. In theology, the state of a luckless mortal prenatally
damned. The doctrine of reprobation was taught by Calvin, whose joy in it
was somewhat marred by the sad sincerity of his conviction that although
some are foredoomed to perdition, others are predestined to salvation.

REPUBLIC, n. A nation in which, the thing governing and the thing governed
being the same, there is only a permitted authority to enforce an optional
obedience. In a republic, the foundation of public order is the ever
lessening habit of submission inherited from ancestors who, being truly
governed, submitted because they had to. There are as many kinds of
republics as there are graduations between the despotism whence they came
and the anarchy whither they lead.

REQUIEM, n. A mass for the dead which the minor poets assure us the winds
sing o’er the graves of their favorites. Sometimes, by way of providing a
varied entertainment, they sing a dirge.

RESIDENT, adj. Unable to leave.

RESIGN, v.t. To renounce an honor for an advantage. To renounce an
advantage for a greater advantage.

Politian Greame

RESOLUTE, adj. Obstinate in a course that we approve.

RESPECTABILITY, n. The offspring of a liaison between a bald head
and a bank account.

RESPIRATOR, n. An apparatus fitted over the nose and mouth of an
inhabitant of London, whereby to filter the visible universe in its
passage to the lungs.

RESPITE, n. A suspension of hostilities against a sentenced assassin, to
enable the Executive to determine whether the murder may not have been
done by the prosecuting attorney. Any break in the continuity of a
disagreeable expectation.

Joel Spate Woop

RESPLENDENT, adj. Like a simple American citizen beduking himself in his
lodge, or affirming his consequence in the Scheme of Things as an
elemental unit of a parade.

“Chronicles of the Classes”

RESPOND, v.i. To make answer, or disclose otherwise a consciousness of
having inspired an interest in what Herbert Spencer calls “external
coexistences,” as Satan “squat like a toad” at the ear of Eve, responded
to the touch of the angel’s spear. To respond in damages is to contribute
to the maintenance of the plaintiff’s attorney and, incidentally, to the
gratification of the plaintiff.

RESPONSIBILITY, n. A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of
God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one’s neighbor. In the days of astrology it
was customary to unload it upon a star.

“The Sturdy Beggar”

RESTITUTION, n. The founding or endowing of universities and public
libraries by gift or bequest.

RESTITUTOR, n. Benefactor; philanthropist.

RETALIATION, n. The natural rock upon which is reared the Temple of Law.

RETRIBUTION, n. A rain of fire-and-brimstone that falls alike upon the
just and such of the unjust as have not procured shelter by evicting them.

In the lines following, addressed to an Emperor in exile by Father
Gassalasca Jape, the reverend poet appears to hint his sense of the
imprudence of turning about to face Retribution when it is taking
exercise:

REVEILLE, n. A signal to sleeping soldiers to dream of battlefields no
more, but get up and have their blue noses counted. In the American army
it is ingeniously called “rev-e-lee,” and to that pronunciation our
countrymen have pledged their lives, their misfortunes and their sacred
dishonor.

REVELATION, n. A famous book in which St. John the Divine concealed all
that he knew. The revealing is done by the commentators, who know nothing.

REVERENCE, n. The spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.

REVIEW, v.t.

REVOLUTION, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
Specifically, in American history, the substitution of the rule of an
Administration for that of a Ministry, whereby the welfare and happiness
of the people were advanced a full half-inch. Revolutions are usually
accompanied by a considerable effusion of blood, but are accounted worth
it—this appraisement being made by beneficiaries whose blood had not
the mischance to be shed. The French revolution is of incalculable value
to the Socialist of to-day; when he pulls the string actuating its bones
its gestures are inexpressibly terrifying to gory tyrants suspected of
fomenting law and order.

RHADOMANCER, n. One who uses a divining-rod in prospecting for precious
metals in the pocket of a fool.

RIBALDRY, n. Censorious language by another concerning oneself.

RIBROASTER, n. Censorious language by oneself concerning another. The word
is of classical refinement, and is even said to have been used in a fable
by Georgius Coadjutor, one of the most fastidious writers of the fifteenth
century—commonly, indeed, regarded as the founder of the Fastidiotic
School.

RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular
novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the
conscience. It is said to be rich in both obtundite and lethargine, and is
brewed in a midnight fog by a fat witch of the Dismal Swamp.

RICH, adj. Holding in trust and subject to an accounting the property of
the indolent, the incompetent, the unthrifty, the envious and the
luckless. That is the view that prevails in the underworld, where the
Brotherhood of Man finds its most logical development and candid advocacy.
To denizens of the midworld the word means good and wise.

RICHES, n.

John D. Rockefeller

J.P. Morgan

Eugene Debs

To these excellent definitions the inspired lexicographer feels that he
can add nothing of value.

RIDICULE, n. Words designed to show that the person of whom they are
uttered is devoid of the dignity of character distinguishing him who
utters them. It may be graphic, mimetic or merely rident. Shaftesbury is
quoted as having pronounced it the test of truth—a ridiculous
assertion, for many a solemn fallacy has undergone centuries of ridicule
with no abatement of its popular acceptance. What, for example, has been
more valorously derided than the doctrine of Infant Respectability?

RIGHT, n. Legitimate authority to be, to do or to have; as the right to be
a king, the right to do one’s neighbor, the right to have measles, and the
like. The first of these rights was once universally believed to be
derived directly from the will of God; and this is still sometimes
affirmed in partibus infidelium outside the enlightened realms of
Democracy; as the well known lines of Sir Abednego Bink, following:

RIGHTEOUSNESS, n. A sturdy virtue that was once found among the
Pantidoodles inhabiting the lower part of the peninsula of Oque. Some
feeble attempts were made by returned missionaries to introduce it into
several European countries, but it appears to have been imperfectly
expounded. An example of this faulty exposition is found in the only
extant sermon of the pious Bishop Rowley, a characteristic passage from
which is here given:

RIME, n. Agreeing sounds in the terminals of verse, mostly bad. The verses
themselves, as distinguished from prose, mostly dull. Usually (and
wickedly) spelled “rhyme.”

RIMER, n. A poet regarded with indifference or disesteem.

Mowbray Myles

RIOT, n. A popular entertainment given to the military by innocent
bystanders.

R.I.P. A careless abbreviation of requiescat in pace, attesting an
indolent goodwill to the dead. According to the learned Dr. Drigge,
however, the letters originally meant nothing more than reductus in
pulvis.

RITE, n. A religious or semi-religious ceremony fixed by law, precept or
custom, with the essential oil of sincerity carefully squeezed out of it.

RITUALISM, n. A Dutch Garden of God where He may walk in rectilinear
freedom, keeping off the grass.

ROAD, n. A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too
tiresome to be to where it is futile to go.

Borey the Bald

ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They
Are. In the novel the writer’s thought is tethered to probability, as a
domestic horse to the hitching-post, but in romance it ranges at will over
the entire region of the imagination—free, lawless, immune to bit
and rein. Your novelist is a poor creature, as Carlyle might say—a
mere reporter. He may invent his characters and plot, but he must not
imagine anything taking place that might not occur, albeit his entire
narrative is candidly a lie. Why he imposes this hard condition on
himself, and “drags at each remove a lengthening chain” of his own forging
he can explain in ten thick volumes without illuminating by so much as a
candle’s ray the black profound of his own ignorance of the matter. There
are great novels, for great writers have “laid waste their powers” to
write them, but it remains true that far and away the most fascinating
fiction that we have is “The Thousand and One Nights.”

ROPE, n. An obsolescent appliance for reminding assassins that they too
are mortal. It is put about the neck and remains in place one’s whole life
long. It has been largely superseded by a more complex electrical device
worn upon another part of the person; and this is rapidly giving place to
an apparatus known as the preachment.

ROSTRUM, n. In Latin, the beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In
America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds
the wisdom, virtue and power of the rabble.

ROUNDHEAD, n. A member of the Parliamentarian party in the English civil
war—so called from his habit of wearing his hair short, whereas his
enemy, the Cavalier, wore his long. There were other points of difference
between them, but the fashion in hair was the fundamental cause of
quarrel. The Cavaliers were royalists because the king, an indolent
fellow, found it more convenient to let his hair grow than to wash his
neck. This the Roundheads, who were mostly barbers and soap-boilers,
deemed an injury to trade, and the royal neck was therefore the object of
their particular indignation. Descendants of the belligerents now wear
their hair all alike, but the fires of animosity enkindled in that ancient
strife smoulder to this day beneath the snows of British civility.

RUBBISH, n. Worthless matter, such as the religions, philosophies,
literatures, arts and sciences of the tribes infesting the regions lying
due south from Boreaplas.

RUIN, v. To destroy. Specifically, to destroy a maid’s belief in the
virtue of maids.

RUM, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total
abstainers.

RUMOR, n. A favorite weapon of the assassins of character.

Joel Buxter

RUSSIAN, n. A person with a Caucasian body and a Mongolian soul. A Tartar
Emetic.

S

SABBATH, n. A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made
the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh. Among the Jews
observance of the day was enforced by a Commandment of which this is the
Christian version: “Remember the seventh day to make thy neighbor keep it
wholly.” To the Creator it seemed fit and expedient that the Sabbath
should be the last day of the week, but the Early Fathers of the Church
held other views. So great is the sanctity of the day that even where the
Lord holds a doubtful and precarious jurisdiction over those who go down
to (and down into) the sea it is reverently recognized, as is manifest in
the following deep-water version of the Fourth Commandment:

Decks are no longer holystoned, but the cable still supplies the captain
with opportunity to attest a pious respect for the divine ordinance.

SACERDOTALIST, n. One who holds the belief that a clergyman is a priest.
Denial of this momentous doctrine is the hardest challenge that is now
flung into the teeth of the Episcopalian church by the Neo-Dictionarians.

SACRAMENT, n. A solemn religious ceremony to which several degrees of
authority and significance are attached. Rome has seven sacraments, but
the Protestant churches, being less prosperous, feel that they can afford
only two, and these of inferior sanctity. Some of the smaller sects have
no sacraments at all—for which mean economy they will indubitable be
damned.

SACRED, adj. Dedicated to some religious purpose; having a divine
character; inspiring solemn thoughts or emotions; as, the Dalai Lama of
Thibet; the Moogum of M’bwango; the temple of Apes in Ceylon; the Cow in
India; the Crocodile, the Cat and the Onion of ancient Egypt; the Mufti of
Moosh; the hair of the dog that bit Noah, etc.

Dumbo Omohundro

SANDLOTTER, n. A vertebrate mammal holding the political views of Denis
Kearney, a notorious demagogue of San Francisco, whose audiences gathered
in the open spaces (sandlots) of the town. True to the traditions of his
species, this leader of the proletariat was finally bought off by his
law-and-order enemies, living prosperously silent and dying impenitently
rich. But before his treason he imposed upon California a constitution
that was a confection of sin in a diction of solecisms. The similarity
between the words “sandlotter” and “sansculotte” is problematically
significant, but indubitably suggestive.

SAFETY-CLUTCH, n. A mechanical device acting automatically to prevent the
fall of an elevator, or cage, in case of an accident to the hoisting
apparatus.

Porfer Poog

SAINT, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.

The Duchess of Orleans relates that the irreverent old calumniator,
Marshal Villeroi, who in his youth had known St. Francis de Sales, said,
on hearing him called saint: “I am delighted to hear that Monsieur de
Sales is a saint. He was fond of saying indelicate things, and used to
cheat at cards. In other respects he was a perfect gentleman, though a
fool.”

SALACITY, n. A certain literary quality frequently observed in popular
novels, especially in those written by women and young girls, who give it
another name and think that in introducing it they are occupying a
neglected field of letters and reaping an overlooked harvest. If they have
the misfortune to live long enough they are tormented with a desire to
burn their sheaves.

SALAMANDER, n. Originally a reptile inhabiting fire; later, an
anthropomorphous immortal, but still a pyrophile. Salamanders are now
believed to be extinct, the last one of which we have an account having
been seen in Carcassonne by the Abbe Belloc, who exorcised it with a
bucket of holy water.

SARCOPHAGUS, n. Among the Greeks a coffin which being made of a certain
kind of carnivorous stone, had the peculiar property of devouring the body
placed in it. The sarcophagus known to modern obsequiographers is commonly
a product of the carpenter’s art.

SATAN, n. One of the Creator’s lamentable mistakes, repented in sashcloth
and axes. Being instated as an archangel, Satan made himself
multifariously objectionable and was finally expelled from Heaven. Halfway
in his descent he paused, bent his head in thought a moment and at last
went back. “There is one favor that I should like to ask,” said he.

“Name it.”

“Man, I understand, is about to be created. He will need laws.”

“What, wretch! you his appointed adversary, charged from the dawn of
eternity with hatred of his soul—you ask for the right to make his
laws?”

“Pardon; what I have to ask is that he be permitted to make them himself.”

It was so ordered.

SATIETY, n. The feeling that one has for the plate after he has eaten its
contents, madam.

SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and
follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.
In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain
existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient,
the humor that we mistake for it, like all humor, being tolerant and
sympathetic. Moreover, although Americans are “endowed by their Creator”
with abundant vice and folly, it is not generally known that these are
reprehensible qualities, wherefore the satirist is popularly regarded as a
sour-spirited knave, and his ever victim’s outcry for codefendants evokes
a national assent.

Barney Stims

SATYR, n. One of the few characters of the Grecian mythology accorded
recognition in the Hebrew. (Leviticus, xvii, 7.) The satyr was at first a
member of the dissolute community acknowledging a loose allegiance with
Dionysius, but underwent many transformations and improvements. Not
infrequently he is confounded with the faun, a later and decenter creation
of the Romans, who was less like a man and more like a goat.

SAUCE, n. The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A
people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has
only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a
vice is renounced and forgiven.

SAW, n. A trite popular saying, or proverb. (Figurative and colloquial.)
So called because it makes its way into a wooden head. Following are
examples of old saws fitted with new teeth.

SCARABAEUS, n. The sacred beetle of the ancient Egyptians, allied to our
familiar “tumble-bug.” It was supposed to symbolize immortality, the fact
that God knew why giving it its peculiar sanctity. Its habit of incubating
its eggs in a ball of ordure may also have commended it to the favor of
the priesthood, and may some day assure it an equal reverence among
ourselves. True, the American beetle is an inferior beetle, but the
American priest is an inferior priest.

SCARABEE, n. The same as scarabaeus.

SCARIFICATION, n. A form of penance practised by the mediaeval pious. The
rite was performed, sometimes with a knife, sometimes with a hot iron, but
always, says Arsenius Asceticus, acceptably if the penitent spared himself
no pain nor harmless disfigurement. Scarification, with other crude
penances, has now been superseded by benefaction. The founding of a
library or endowment of a university is said to yield to the penitent a
sharper and more lasting pain than is conferred by the knife or iron, and
is therefore a surer means of grace. There are, however, two grave
objections to it as a penitential method: the good that it does and the
taint of justice.

SCEPTER, n. A king’s staff of office, the sign and symbol of his
authority. It was originally a mace with which the sovereign admonished
his jester and vetoed ministerial measures by breaking the bones of their
proponents.

SCIMITAR, n. A curved sword of exceeding keenness, in the conduct of which
certain Orientals attain a surprising proficiency, as the incident here
related will serve to show. The account is translated from the Japanese of
Shusi Itama, a famous writer of the thirteenth century.

SCRAP-BOOK, n. A book that is commonly edited by a fool. Many persons of
some small distinction compile scrap-books containing whatever they happen
to read about themselves or employ others to collect. One of these
egotists was addressed in the lines following, by Agamemnon Melancthon
Peters:

SCRIBBLER, n. A professional writer whose views are antagonistic to one’s
own.

SCRIPTURES, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished
from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

SEAL, n. A mark impressed upon certain kinds of documents to attest their
authenticity and authority. Sometimes it is stamped upon wax, and attached
to the paper, sometimes into the paper itself. Sealing, in this sense, is
a survival of an ancient custom of inscribing important papers with
cabalistic words or signs to give them a magical efficacy independent of
the authority that they represent. In the British museum are preserved
many ancient papers, mostly of a sacerdotal character, validated by
necromantic pentagrams and other devices, frequently initial letters of
words to conjure with; and in many instances these are attached in the
same way that seals are appended now. As nearly every reasonless and
apparently meaningless custom, rite or observance of modern times had
origin in some remote utility, it is pleasing to note an example of
ancient nonsense evolving in the process of ages into something really
useful. Our word “sincere” is derived from sine cero, without wax,
but the learned are not in agreement as to whether this refers to the
absence of the cabalistic signs, or to that of the wax with which letters
were formerly closed from public scrutiny. Either view of the matter will
serve one in immediate need of an hypothesis. The initials L.S., commonly
appended to signatures of legal documents, mean locum sigillis, the
place of the seal, although the seal is no longer used —an admirable
example of conservatism distinguishing Man from the beasts that perish.
The words locum sigillis are humbly suggested as a suitable motto
for the Pribyloff Islands whenever they shall take their place as a
sovereign State of the American Union.

SEINE, n. A kind of net for effecting an involuntary change of
environment. For fish it is made strong and coarse, but women are more
easily taken with a singularly delicate fabric weighted with small, cut
stones.

Baruch de Loppis

SELF-ESTEEM, n. An erroneous appraisement.

SELF-EVIDENT, adj. Evident to one’s self and to nobody else.

SELFISH, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.

SENATE, n. A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and
misdemeanors.

SERIAL, n. A literary work, usually a story that is not true, creeping
through several issues of a newspaper or magazine. Frequently appended to
each installment is a “synposis of preceding chapters” for those who have
not read them, but a direr need is a synposis of succeeding chapters for
those who do not intend to read them. A synposis of the entire work
would be still better.

The late James F. Bowman was writing a serial tale for a weekly paper in
collaboration with a genius whose name has not come down to us. They
wrote, not jointly but alternately, Bowman supplying the installment for
one week, his friend for the next, and so on, world without end, they
hoped. Unfortunately they quarreled, and one Monday morning when Bowman
read the paper to prepare himself for his task, he found his work cut out
for him in a way to surprise and pain him. His collaborator had embarked
every character of the narrative on a ship and sunk them all in the
deepest part of the Atlantic.

SEVERALTY, n. Separateness, as, lands in severalty, i.e., lands held
individually, not in joint ownership. Certain tribes of Indians are
believed now to be sufficiently civilized to have in severalty the lands
that they have hitherto held as tribal organizations, and could not sell
to the Whites for waxen beads and potato whiskey.

SHERIFF, n. In America the chief executive officer of a county, whose most
characteristic duties, in some of the Western and Southern States, are the
catching and hanging of rogues.

J. Milton Sloluck

SIREN, n. One of several musical prodigies famous for a vain attempt to
dissuade Odysseus from a life on the ocean wave. Figuratively, any lady of
splendid promise, dissembled purpose and disappointing performance.

SLANG, n. The grunt of the human hog (Pignoramus intolerabilis)
with an audible memory. The speech of one who utters with his tongue what
he thinks with his ear, and feels the pride of a creator in accomplishing
the feat of a parrot. A means (under Providence) of setting up as a wit
without a capital of sense.

SMITHAREEN, n. A fragment, a decomponent part, a remain. The word is used
variously, but in the following verse on a noted female reformer who
opposed bicycle-riding by women because it “led them to the devil” it is
seen at its best:

John William Yope

SOPHISTRY, n. The controversial method of an opponent, distinguished from
one’s own by superior insincerity and fooling. This method is that of the
later Sophists, a Grecian sect of philosophers who began by teaching
wisdom, prudence, science, art and, in brief, whatever men ought to know,
but lost themselves in a maze of quibbles and a fog of words.

Polydore Smith

SORCERY, n. The ancient prototype and forerunner of political influence.
It was, however, deemed less respectable and sometimes was punished by
torture and death. Augustine Nicholas relates that a poor peasant who had
been accused of sorcery was put to the torture to compel a confession.
After enduring a few gentle agonies the suffering simpleton admitted his
guilt, but naively asked his tormentors if it were not possible to be a
sorcerer without knowing it.

SOUL, n. A spiritual entity concerning which there hath been brave
disputation. Plato held that those souls which in a previous state of
existence (antedating Athens) had obtained the clearest glimpses of
eternal truth entered into the bodies of persons who became philosophers.
Plato himself was a philosopher. The souls that had least contemplated
divine truth animated the bodies of usurpers and despots. Dionysius I, who
had threatened to decapitate the broad-browed philosopher, was a usurper
and a despot. Plato, doubtless, was not the first to construct a system of
philosophy that could be quoted against his enemies; certainly he was not
the last.

“Concerning the nature of the soul,” saith the renowned author of Diversiones
Sanctorum, “there hath been hardly more argument than that of its
place in the body. Mine own belief is that the soul hath her seat in the
abdomen—in which faith we may discern and interpret a truth hitherto
unintelligible, namely that the glutton is of all men most devout. He is
said in the Scripture to ‘make a god of his belly’ —why, then,
should he not be pious, having ever his Deity with him to freshen his
faith? Who so well as he can know the might and majesty that he shrines?
Truly and soberly, the soul and the stomach are one Divine Entity; and
such was the belief of Promasius, who nevertheless erred in denying it
immortality. He had observed that its visible and material substance
failed and decayed with the rest of the body after death, but of its
immaterial essence he knew nothing. This is what we call the Appetite, and
it survives the wreck and reek of mortality, to be rewarded or punished in
another world, according to what it hath demanded in the flesh. The
Appetite whose coarse clamoring was for the unwholesome viands of the
general market and the public refectory shall be cast into eternal famine,
whilst that which firmly though civilly insisted on ortolans, caviare,
terrapin, anchovies, pates de foie gras and all such Christian
comestibles shall flesh its spiritual tooth in the souls of them forever
and ever, and wreak its divine thirst upon the immortal parts of the
rarest and richest wines ever quaffed here below. Such is my religious
faith, though I grieve to confess that neither His Holiness the Pope nor
His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury (whom I equally and profoundly
revere) will assent to its dissemination.”

SPOOKER, n. A writer whose imagination concerns itself with supernatural
phenomena, especially in the doings of spooks. One of the most illustrious
spookers of our time is Mr. William D. Howells, who introduces a
well-credentialed reader to as respectable and mannerly a company of
spooks as one could wish to meet. To the terror that invests the chairman
of a district school board, the Howells ghost adds something of the
mystery enveloping a farmer from another township.

STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. The truth of the stories here
following has, however, not been successfully impeached.

One evening Mr. Rudolph Block, of New York, found himself seated at dinner
alongside Mr. Percival Pollard, the distinguished critic.

“Mr. Pollard,” said he, “my book, The Biography of a Dead Cow, is
published anonymously, but you can hardly be ignorant of its authorship.
Yet in reviewing it you speak of it as the work of the Idiot of the
Century. Do you think that fair criticism?”

“I am very sorry, sir,” replied the critic, amiably, “but it did not occur
to me that you really might not wish the public to know who wrote it.”

Mr. W.C. Morrow, who used to live in San Jose, California, was addicted to
writing ghost stories which made the reader feel as if a stream of
lizards, fresh from the ice, were streaking it up his back and hiding in
his hair. San Jose was at that time believed to be haunted by the visible
spirit of a noted bandit named Vasquez, who had been hanged there. The
town was not very well lighted, and it is putting it mildly to say that
San Jose was reluctant to be out o’ nights. One particularly dark night
two gentlemen were abroad in the loneliest spot within the city limits,
talking loudly to keep up their courage, when they came upon Mr. J.J.
Owen, a well-known journalist.

“Why, Owen,” said one, “what brings you here on such a night as this? You
told me that this is one of Vasquez’ favorite haunts! And you are a
believer. Aren’t you afraid to be out?”

“My dear fellow,” the journalist replied with a drear autumnal cadence in
his speech, like the moan of a leaf-laden wind, “I am afraid to be in. I
have one of Will Morrow’s stories in my pocket and I don’t dare to go
where there is light enough to read it.”

Rear-Admiral Schley and Representative Charles F. Joy were standing near
the Peace Monument, in Washington, discussing the question, Is success a
failure? Mr. Joy suddenly broke off in the middle of an eloquent sentence,
exclaiming: “Hello! I’ve heard that band before. Santlemann’s, I think.”

“I don’t hear any band,” said Schley.

“Come to think, I don’t either,” said Joy; “but I see General Miles coming
down the avenue, and that pageant always affects me in the same way as a
brass band. One has to scrutinize one’s impressions pretty closely, or one
will mistake their origin.”

While the Admiral was digesting this hasty meal of philosophy General
Miles passed in review, a spectacle of impressive dignity. When the tail
of the seeming procession had passed and the two observers had recovered
from the transient blindness caused by its effulgence—

“He seems to be enjoying himself,” said the Admiral.

“There is nothing,” assented Joy, thoughtfully, “that he enjoys one-half
so well.”

The illustrious statesman, Champ Clark, once lived about a mile from the
village of Jebigue, in Missouri. One day he rode into town on a favorite
mule, and, hitching the beast on the sunny side of a street, in front of a
saloon, he went inside in his character of teetotaler, to apprise the
barkeeper that wine is a mocker. It was a dreadfully hot day. Pretty soon
a neighbor came in and seeing Clark, said:

“Champ, it is not right to leave that mule out there in the sun. He’ll
roast, sure!—he was smoking as I passed him.”

“O, he’s all right,” said Clark, lightly; “he’s an inveterate smoker.”

The neighbor took a lemonade, but shook his head and repeated that it was
not right.

He was a conspirator. There had been a fire the night before: a stable
just around the corner had burned and a number of horses had put on their
immortality, among them a young colt, which was roasted to a rich
nut-brown. Some of the boys had turned Mr. Clark’s mule loose and
substituted the mortal part of the colt. Presently another man entered the
saloon.

“For mercy’s sake!” he said, taking it with sugar, “do remove that mule,
barkeeper: it smells.”

“Yes,” interposed Clark, “that animal has the best nose in Missouri. But
if he doesn’t mind, you shouldn’t.”

In the course of human events Mr. Clark went out, and there, apparently,
lay the incinerated and shrunken remains of his charger. The boys did not
have any fun out of Mr. Clarke, who looked at the body and, with the
non-committal expression to which he owes so much of his political
preferment, went away. But walking home late that night he saw his mule
standing silent and solemn by the wayside in the misty moonlight.
Mentioning the name of Helen Blazes with uncommon emphasis, Mr. Clark took
the back track as hard as ever he could hook it, and passed the night in
town.

General H.H. Wotherspoon, president of the Army War College, has a pet
rib-nosed baboon, an animal of uncommon intelligence but imperfectly
beautiful. Returning to his apartment one evening, the General was
surprised and pained to find Adam (for so the creature is named, the
general being a Darwinian) sitting up for him and wearing his master’s
best uniform coat, epaulettes and all.

“You confounded remote ancestor!” thundered the great strategist, “what do
you mean by being out of bed after naps?—and with my coat on!”

Adam rose and with a reproachful look got down on all fours in the manner
of his kind and, scuffling across the room to a table, returned with a
visiting-card: General Barry had called and, judging by an empty champagne
bottle and several cigar-stumps, had been hospitably entertained while
waiting. The general apologized to his faithful progenitor and retired.
The next day he met General Barry, who said:

“Spoon, old man, when leaving you last evening I forgot to ask you about
those excellent cigars. Where did you get them?”

General Wotherspoon did not deign to reply, but walked away.

“Pardon me, please,” said Barry, moving after him; “I was joking of
course. Why, I knew it was not you before I had been in the room fifteen
minutes.”

SUCCESS, n. The one unpardonable sin against one’s fellows. In literature,
and particularly in poetry, the elements of success are exceedingly
simple, and are admirably set forth in the following lines by the reverend
Father Gassalasca Jape, entitled, for some mysterious reason, “John A.
Joyce.”

SUFFRAGE, n. Expression of opinion by means of a ballot. The right of
suffrage (which is held to be both a privilege and a duty) means, as
commonly interpreted, the right to vote for the man of another man’s
choice, and is highly prized. Refusal to do so has the bad name of
“incivism.” The incivilian, however, cannot be properly arraigned for his
crime, for there is no legitimate accuser. If the accuser is himself
guilty he has no standing in the court of opinion; if not, he profits by
the crime, for A’s abstention from voting gives greater weight to the vote
of B. By female suffrage is meant the right of a woman to vote as some man
tells her to. It is based on female responsibility, which is somewhat
limited. The woman most eager to jump out of her petticoat to assert her
rights is first to jump back into it when threatened with a switching for
misusing them.

SYCOPHANT, n. One who approaches Greatness on his belly so that he may not
be commanded to turn and be kicked. He is sometimes an editor.

SYLLOGISM, n. A logical formula consisting of a major and a minor
assumption and an inconsequent. (See LOGIC.)

SYLPH, n. An immaterial but visible being that inhabited the air when the
air was an element and before it was fatally polluted with factory smoke,
sewer gas and similar products of civilization. Sylphs were allied to
gnomes, nymphs and salamanders, which dwelt, respectively, in earth, water
and fire, all now insalubrious. Sylphs, like fowls of the air, were male
and female, to no purpose, apparently, for if they had progeny they must
have nested in inaccessible places, none of the chicks having ever been
seen.

SYMBOL, n. Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something
else. Many symbols are mere “survivals”—things which having no
longer any utility continue to exist because we have inherited the
tendency to make them; as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. They
were once real urns holding the ashes of the dead. We cannot stop making
them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.

SYMBOLIC, adj. Pertaining to symbols and the use and interpretation of
symbols.

G.J.

T

T, the twentieth letter of the English alphabet, was by the Greeks
absurdly called tau. In the alphabet whence ours comes it had the
form of the rude corkscrew of the period, and when it stood alone (which
was more than the Phoenicians could always do) signified Tallegal,
translated by the learned Dr. Brownrigg, “tanglefoot.”

TABLE D’HOTE, n. A caterer’s thrifty concession to the universal passion
for irresponsibility.

Associated Poets

TAIL, n. The part of an animal’s spine that has transcended its natural
limitations to set up an independent existence in a world of its own.
Excepting in its foetal state, Man is without a tail, a privation of which
he attests an hereditary and uneasy consciousness by the coat-skirt of the
male and the train of the female, and by a marked tendency to ornament
that part of his attire where the tail should be, and indubitably once
was. This tendency is most observable in the female of the species, in
whom the ancestral sense is strong and persistent. The tailed men
described by Lord Monboddo are now generally regarded as a product of an
imagination unusually susceptible to influences generated in the golden
age of our pithecan past.

TAKE, v.t. To acquire, frequently by force but preferably by stealth.

TALK, v.t. To commit an indiscretion without temptation, from an impulse
without purpose.

TARIFF, n. A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic
producer against the greed of his consumer.

Edam Smith

TECHNICALITY, n. In an English court a man named Home was tried for
slander in having accused his neighbor of murder. His exact words were:
“Sir Thomas Holt hath taken a cleaver and stricken his cook upon the head,
so that one side of the head fell upon one shoulder and the other side
upon the other shoulder.” The defendant was acquitted by instruction of
the court, the learned judges holding that the words did not charge
murder, for they did not affirm the death of the cook, that being only an
inference.

TEDIUM, n. Ennui, the state or condition of one that is bored. Many
fanciful derivations of the word have been affirmed, but so high an
authority as Father Jape says that it comes from a very obvious source—the
first words of the ancient Latin hymn Te Deum Laudamus. In this
apparently natural derivation there is something that saddens.

TEETOTALER, n. One who abstains from strong drink, sometimes totally,
sometimes tolerably totally.

TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the
advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

TELESCOPE, n. A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the
telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a
multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell
summoning us to the sacrifice.

TENACITY, n. A certain quality of the human hand in its relation to the
coin of the realm. It attains its highest development in the hand of
authority and is considered a serviceable equipment for a career in
politics. The following illustrative lines were written of a Californian
gentleman in high political preferment, who has passed to his accounting:

THEOSOPHY, n. An ancient faith having all the certitude of religion and
all the mystery of science. The modern Theosophist holds, with the
Buddhists, that we live an incalculable number of times on this earth, in
as many several bodies, because one life is not long enough for our
complete spiritual development; that is, a single lifetime does not
suffice for us to become as wise and good as we choose to wish to become.
To be absolutely wise and good—that is perfection; and the
Theosophist is so keen-sighted as to have observed that everything
desirous of improvement eventually attains perfection. Less competent
observers are disposed to except cats, which seem neither wiser nor better
than they were last year. The greatest and fattest of recent Theosophists
was the late Madame Blavatsky, who had no cat.

TIGHTS, n. An habiliment of the stage designed to reinforce the general
acclamation of the press agent with a particular publicity. Public
attention was once somewhat diverted from this garment to Miss Lillian
Russell’s refusal to wear it, and many were the conjectures as to her
motive, the guess of Miss Pauline Hall showing a high order of ingenuity
and sustained reflection. It was Miss Hall’s belief that nature had not
endowed Miss Russell with beautiful legs. This theory was impossible of
acceptance by the male understanding, but the conception of a faulty
female leg was of so prodigious originality as to rank among the most
brilliant feats of philosophical speculation! It is strange that in all
the controversy regarding Miss Russell’s aversion to tights no one seems
to have thought to ascribe it to what was known among the ancients as
“modesty.” The nature of that sentiment is now imperfectly understood, and
possibly incapable of exposition with the vocabulary that remains to us.
The study of lost arts has, however, been recently revived and some of the
arts themselves recovered. This is an epoch of renaissances, and
there is ground for hope that the primitive “blush” may be dragged from
its hiding-place amongst the tombs of antiquity and hissed on to the
stage.

TOMB, n. The House of Indifference. Tombs are now by common consent
invested with a certain sanctity, but when they have been long tenanted it
is considered no sin to break them open and rifle them, the famous
Egyptologist, Dr. Huggyns, explaining that a tomb may be innocently
“glened” as soon as its occupant is done “smellynge,” the soul being then
all exhaled. This reasonable view is now generally accepted by
archaeologists, whereby the noble science of Curiosity has been greatly
dignified.

TOPE, v. To tipple, booze, swill, soak, guzzle, lush, bib, or swig. In the
individual, toping is regarded with disesteem, but toping nations are in
the forefront of civilization and power. When pitted against the
hard-drinking Christians the abstemious Mahometans go down like grass
before the scythe. In India one hundred thousand beef-eating and
brandy-and-soda guzzling Britons hold in subjection two hundred and fifty
million vegetarian abstainers of the same Aryan race. With what an easy
grace the whisky-loving American pushed the temperate Spaniard out of his
possessions! From the time when the Berserkers ravaged all the coasts of
western Europe and lay drunk in every conquered port it has been the same
way: everywhere the nations that drink too much are observed to fight
rather well and not too righteously. Wherefore the estimable old ladies
who abolished the canteen from the American army may justly boast of
having materially augmented the nation’s military power.

TORTOISE, n. A creature thoughtfully created to supply occasion for the
following lines by the illustrious Ambat Delaso:

TO MY PET TORTOISE

TREE, n. A tall vegetable intended by nature to serve as a penal
apparatus, though through a miscarriage of justice most trees bear only a
negligible fruit, or none at all. When naturally fruited, the tree is a
beneficient agency of civilization and an important factor in public
morals. In the stern West and the sensitive South its fruit (white and
black respectively) though not eaten, is agreeable to the public taste
and, though not exported, profitable to the general welfare. That the
legitimate relation of the tree to justice was no discovery of Judge Lynch
(who, indeed, conceded it no primacy over the lamp-post and the
bridge-girder) is made plain by the following passage from Morryster, who
antedated him by two centuries:

Trauvells in ye Easte

TRIAL, n. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the
blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors. In order to effect
this purpose it is necessary to supply a contrast in the person of one who
is called the defendant, the prisoner, or the accused. If the contrast is
made sufficiently clear this person is made to undergo such an affliction
as will give the virtuous gentlemen a comfortable sense of their immunity,
added to that of their worth. In our day the accused is usually a human
being, or a socialist, but in mediaeval times, animals, fishes, reptiles
and insects were brought to trial. A beast that had taken human life, or
practiced sorcery, was duly arrested, tried and, if condemned, put to
death by the public executioner. Insects ravaging grain fields, orchards
or vineyards were cited to appeal by counsel before a civil tribunal, and
after testimony, argument and condemnation, if they continued in
contumaciam the matter was taken to a high ecclesiastical court, where
they were solemnly excommunicated and anathematized. In a street of
Toledo, some pigs that had wickedly run between the viceroy’s legs,
upsetting him, were arrested on a warrant, tried and punished. In Naples
an ass was condemned to be burned at the stake, but the sentence appears
not to have been executed. D’Addosio relates from the court records many
trials of pigs, bulls, horses, cocks, dogs, goats, etc., greatly, it is
believed, to the betterment of their conduct and morals. In 1451 a suit
was brought against the leeches infesting some ponds about Berne, and the
Bishop of Lausanne, instructed by the faculty of Heidelberg University,
directed that some of “the aquatic worms” be brought before the local
magistracy. This was done and the leeches, both present and absent, were
ordered to leave the places that they had infested within three days on
pain of incurring “the malediction of God.” In the voluminous records of
this cause celebre nothing is found to show whether the offenders
braved the punishment, or departed forthwith out of that inhospitable
jurisdiction.

TRICHINOSIS, n. The pig’s reply to proponents of porcophagy.

Moses Mendlessohn having fallen ill sent for a Christian physician, who at
once diagnosed the philosopher’s disorder as trichinosis, but tactfully
gave it another name. “You need an immediate change of diet,” he said;
“you must eat six ounces of pork every other day.”

“Pork?” shrieked the patient—”pork? Nothing shall induce me to touch
it!”

“Do you mean that?” the doctor gravely asked.

“I swear it!”

“Good!—then I will undertake to cure you.”

TRINITY, n. In the multiplex theism of certain Christian churches, three
entirely distinct deities consistent with only one. Subordinate deities of
the polytheistic faith, such as devils and angels, are not dowered with
the power of combination, and must urge individually their claims to
adoration and propitiation. The Trinity is one of the most sublime
mysteries of our holy religion. In rejecting it because it is
incomprehensible, Unitarians betray their inadequate sense of theological
fundamentals. In religion we believe only what we do not understand,
except in the instance of an intelligible doctrine that contradicts an
incomprehensible one. In that case we believe the former as a part of the
latter.

TROGLODYTE, n. Specifically, a cave-dweller of the paleolithic period,
after the Tree and before the Flat. A famous community of troglodytes
dwelt with David in the Cave of Adullam. The colony consisted of “every
one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one
that was discontented”—in brief, all the Socialists of Judah.

TRUCE, n. Friendship.

TRUTH, n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery
of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient
occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with
increasing activity to the end of time.

TRUTHFUL, adj. Dumb and illiterate.

TRUST, n. In American politics, a large corporation composed in greater
part of thrifty working men, widows of small means, orphans in the care of
guardians and the courts, with many similar malefactors and public
enemies.

TURKEY, n. A large bird whose flesh when eaten on certain religious
anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude.
Incidentally, it is pretty good eating.

TWICE, adv. Once too often.

TYPE, n. Pestilent bits of metal suspected of destroying civilization and
enlightenment, despite their obvious agency in this incomparable
dictionary.

TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect (Glossina morsitans)
whose bite is commonly regarded as nature’s most efficacious remedy for
insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist (Mendax
interminabilis).

U

UBIQUITY, n. The gift or power of being in all places at one time, but not
in all places at all times, which is omnipresence, an attribute of God and
the luminiferous ether only. This important distinction between ubiquity
and omnipresence was not clear to the mediaeval Church and there was much
bloodshed about it. Certain Lutherans, who affirmed the presence
everywhere of Christ’s body were known as Ubiquitarians. For this error
they were doubtless damned, for Christ’s body is present only in the
eucharist, though that sacrament may be performed in more than one place
simultaneously. In recent times ubiquity has not always been understood—not
even by Sir Boyle Roche, for example, who held that a man cannot be in two
places at once unless he is a bird.

UGLINESS, n. A gift of the gods to certain women, entailing virtue without
humility.

ULTIMATUM, n. In diplomacy, a last demand before resorting to concessions.

Having received an ultimatum from Austria, the Turkish Ministry met to
consider it.

“O servant of the Prophet,” said the Sheik of the Imperial Chibouk to the
Mamoosh of the Invincible Army, “how many unconquerable soldiers have we
in arms?”

“Upholder of the Faith,” that dignitary replied after examining his
memoranda, “they are in numbers as the leaves of the forest!”

“And how many impenetrable battleships strike terror to the hearts of all
Christian swine?” he asked the Imaum of the Ever Victorious Navy.

“Uncle of the Full Moon,” was the reply, “deign to know that they are as
the waves of the ocean, the sands of the desert and the stars of Heaven!”

For eight hours the broad brow of the Sheik of the Imperial Chibouk was
corrugated with evidences of deep thought: he was calculating the chances
of war. Then, “Sons of angels,” he said, “the die is cast! I shall suggest
to the Ulema of the Imperial Ear that he advise inaction. In the name of
Allah, the council is adjourned.”

UN-AMERICAN, adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish.

UNCTION, n. An oiling, or greasing. The rite of extreme unction consists
in touching with oil consecrated by a bishop several parts of the body of
one engaged in dying. Marbury relates that after the rite had been
administered to a certain wicked English nobleman it was discovered that
the oil had not been properly consecrated and no other could be obtained.
When informed of this the sick man said in anger: “Then I’ll be damned if
I die!”

“My son,” said the priest, “this is what we fear.”

UNDERSTANDING, n. A cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know
a house from a horse by the roof on the house. Its nature and laws have
been exhaustively expounded by Locke, who rode a house, and Kant, who
lived in a horse.

Jorrock Wormley

UNITARIAN, n. One who denies the divinity of a Trinitarian.

UNIVERSALIST, n. One who forgoes the advantage of a Hell for persons of
another faith.

URBANITY, n. The kind of civility that urban observers ascribe to dwellers
in all cities but New York. Its commonest expression is heard in the
words, “I beg your pardon,” and it is not inconsistent with disregard of the
rights of others.

Swatkin

USAGE, n. The First Person of the literary Trinity, the Second and Third
being Custom and Conventionality. Imbued with a decent reverence for this
Holy Triad an industrious writer may hope to produce books that will live
as long as the fashion.

UXORIOUSNESS, n. A perverted affection that has strayed to one’s own wife.

V

VALOR, n. A soldierly compound of vanity, duty and the gambler’s hope.

“Why have you halted?” roared the commander of a division and Chickamauga,
who had ordered a charge; “move forward, sir, at once.”

“General,” said the commander of the delinquent brigade, “I am persuaded
that any further display of valor by my troops will bring them into
collision with the enemy.”

VANITY, n. The tribute of a fool to the worth of the nearest ass.

Hannibal Hunsiker

VIRTUES, n.pl. Certain abstentions.

VITUPERATION, n. Satire, as understood by dunces and all such as suffer
from an impediment in their wit.

VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of
himself and a wreck of his country.

W

W (double U) has, of all the letters in our alphabet, the only cumbrous
name, the names of the others being monosyllabic. This advantage of the
Roman alphabet over the Grecian is the more valued after audibly spelling
out some simple Greek word, like epixoriambikos. Still, it is now
thought by the learned that other agencies than the difference of the two
alphabets may have been concerned in the decline of “the glory that was
Greece” and the rise of “the grandeur that was Rome.” There can be no
doubt, however, that by simplifying the name of W (calling it “wow,” for
example) our civilization could be, if not promoted, at least better
endured.

WALL STREET, n. A symbol of sin for every devil to rebuke. That Wall
Street is a den of thieves is a belief that serves every unsuccessful
thief in place of a hope in Heaven. Even the great and good Andrew
Carnegie has made his profession of faith in the matter.

Anonymus Bink

WAR, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political
condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who
has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself
inaccessible to the light. “In time of peace prepare for war” has a deeper
meaning than is commonly discerned; it means, not merely that all things
earthly have an end—that change is the one immutable and eternal law—but
that the soil of peace is thickly sown with the seeds of war and
singularly suited to their germination and growth. It was when Kubla Khan
had decreed his “stately pleasure dome”—when, that is to say, there
were peace and fat feasting in Xanadu—that he

One of the greatest of poets, Coleridge was one of the wisest of men, and
it was not for nothing that he read us this parable. Let us have a little
less of “hands across the sea,” and a little more of that elemental
distrust that is the security of nations. War loves to come like a thief
in the night; professions of eternal amity provide the night.

WASHINGTONIAN, n. A Potomac tribesman who exchanged the privilege of
governing himself for the advantage of good government. In justice to him
it should be said that he did not want to.

Offenbach Stutz

WEAKNESSES, n.pl. Certain primal powers of Tyrant Woman wherewith she
holds dominion over the male of her species, binding him to the service of
her will and paralyzing his rebellious energies.

WEATHER, n. The climate of the hour. A permanent topic of conversation
among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the
tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly
concerned. The setting up official weather bureaus and their maintenance
in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the
rude forefathers of the jungle.

Halcyon Jones

WEDDING, n. A ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one, one
undertakes to become nothing, and nothing undertakes to become
supportable.

WEREWOLF, n. A wolf that was once, or is sometimes, a man. All werewolves
are of evil disposition, having assumed a bestial form to gratify a
beastial appetite, but some, transformed by sorcery, are as humane as is
consistent with an acquired taste for human flesh.

Some Bavarian peasants having caught a wolf one evening, tied it to a post
by the tail and went to bed. The next morning nothing was there! Greatly
perplexed, they consulted the local priest, who told them that their
captive was undoubtedly a werewolf and had resumed its human form during
the night. “The next time that you take a wolf,” the good man said, “see
that you chain it by the leg, and in the morning you will find a
Lutheran.”

WHANGDEPOOTENAWAH, n. In the Ojibwa tongue, disaster; an unexpected
affliction that strikes hard.

WHEAT, n. A cereal from which a tolerably good whisky can with some
difficulty be made, and which is used also for bread. The French are said
to eat more bread per capita of population than any other people,
which is natural, for only they know how to make the stuff palatable.

WHITE, adj. and n. Black.

WIDOW, n. A pathetic figure that the Christian world has agreed to take
humorously, although Christ’s tenderness towards widows was one of the
most marked features of his character.

WINE, n. Fermented grape-juice known to the Women’s Christian Union as
“liquor,” sometimes as “rum.” Wine, madam, is God’s next best gift to man.

WIT, n. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual
cookery by leaving it out.

WITCH, n. (1) Any ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with
the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a
league beyond the devil.

WITTICISM, n. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted, and seldom noted;
what the Philistine is pleased to call a “joke.”

WOMAN, n.

Balthasar Pober

WORMS’-MEAT, n. The finished product of which we are the raw material. The
contents of the Taj Mahal, the Tombeau Napoleon and the Grantarium.
Worms’-meat is usually outlasted by the structure that houses it, but
“this too must pass away.” Probably the silliest work in which a human
being can engage is construction of a tomb for himself. The solemn purpose
cannot dignify, but only accentuates by contrast the foreknown futility.

Joel Huck

WORSHIP, n. Homo Creator’s testimony to the sound construction and fine
finish of Deus Creatus. A popular form of abjection, having an element of
pride.

WRATH, n. Anger of a superior quality and degree, appropriate to exalted
characters and momentous occasions; as, “the wrath of God,” “the day of
wrath,” etc. Amongst the ancients the wrath of kings was deemed sacred,
for it could usually command the agency of some god for its fit
manifestation, as could also that of a priest. The Greeks before Troy were
so harried by Apollo that they jumped out of the frying-pan of the wrath
of Chryses into the fire of the wrath of Achilles, though Agamemnon, the
sole offender, was neither fried nor roasted. A similar noted immunity was
that of David when he incurred the wrath of Yahveh by numbering his
people, seventy thousand of whom paid the penalty with their lives. God is
now Love, and a director of the census performs his work without
apprehension of disaster.

X

X in our alphabet being a needless letter has an added invincibility to
the attacks of the spelling reformers, and like them, will doubtless last
as long as the language. X is the sacred symbol of ten dollars, and in
such words as Xmas, Xn, etc., stands for Christ, not, as is popular
supposed, because it represents a cross, but because the corresponding
letter in the Greek alphabet is the initial of his name —Xristos.
If it represented a cross it would stand for St. Andrew, who “testified”
upon one of that shape. In the algebra of psychology x stands for Woman’s
mind. Words beginning with X are Grecian and will not be defined in this
standard English dictionary.

Y

YANKEE, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a
New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See DAMNYANK.)

YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

YESTERDAY, n. The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire past
of age.

Baruch Arnegriff

It is said that in his last illness the poet Arnegriff was attended at
different times by seven doctors.

YOKE, n. An implement, madam, to whose Latin name, jugum, we owe
one of the most illuminating words in our language—a word that
defines the matrimonial situation with precision, point and poignancy. A
thousand apologies for withholding it.

YOUTH, n. The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum,
Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of
endowing a living Homer.

Polydore Smith

Z

ZANY, n. A popular character in old Italian plays, who imitated with
ludicrous incompetence the buffone, or clown, and was therefore the
ape of an ape; for the clown himself imitated the serious characters of
the play. The zany was progenitor to the specialist in humor, as we to-day
have the unhappiness to know him. In the zany we see an example of
creation; in the humorist, of transmission. Another excellent specimen of
the modern zany is the curate, who apes the rector, who apes the bishop,
who apes the archbishop, who apes the devil.

ZANZIBARI, n. An inhabitant of the Sultanate of Zanzibar, off the eastern
coast of Africa. The Zanzibaris, a warlike people, are best known in this
country through a threatening diplomatic incident that occurred a few
years ago. The American consul at the capital occupied a dwelling that
faced the sea, with a sandy beach between. Greatly to the scandal of this
official’s family, and against repeated remonstrances of the official
himself, the people of the city persisted in using the beach for bathing.
One day a woman came down to the edge of the water and was stooping to
remove her attire (a pair of sandals) when the consul, incensed beyond
restraint, fired a charge of bird-shot into the most conspicuous part of
her person. Unfortunately for the existing entente cordiale between
two great nations, she was the Sultana.

ZEAL, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and
inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.

Jum Coople

ZENITH, n. The point in the heavens directly overhead to a man standing or
a growing cabbage. A man in bed or a cabbage in the pot is not considered
as having a zenith, though from this view of the matter there was once a
considerably dissent among the learned, some holding that the posture of
the body was immaterial. These were called Horizontalists, their
opponents, Verticalists. The Horizontalist heresy was finally extinguished
by Xanobus, the philosopher-king of Abara, a zealous Verticalist. Entering
an assembly of philosophers who were debating the matter, he cast a
severed human head at the feet of his opponents and asked them to
determine its zenith, explaining that its body was hanging by the heels
outside. Observing that it was the head of their leader, the
Horizontalists hastened to profess themselves converted to whatever
opinion the Crown might be pleased to hold, and Horizontalism took its
place among fides defuncti.

ZEUS, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by
the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers who have
touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have
penetrated a considerable distance to the interior, have thought that
these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental
work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists,
each having no other god than himself, whom he worships under many sacred
names.

ZIGZAG, v.t. To move forward uncertainly, from side to side, as one
carrying the white man’s burden. (From zed, z, and jag,
an Icelandic word of unknown meaning.)

Munwele

ZOOLOGY, n. The science and history of the animal kingdom, including its
king, the House Fly (Musca maledicta). The father of Zoology was
Aristotle, as is universally conceded, but the name of its mother has not
come down to us. Two of the science’s most illustrious expounders were
Buffon and Oliver Goldsmith, from both of whom we learn (L’Histoire
generale des animaux and A History of Animated Nature) that the
domestic cow sheds its horns every two years.