EMBALM, v. t. 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 glutæus 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 furthest removed on either hand from the
Interlocutor.
The man was perishing apace
Who played the tambourine:
The seal of death was on his face--
'T was pallid, for't was clean.
"This is the end," the sick man said
In faint and failing tones.
A moment later he was dead,
And Tambourine was Bones.
Tinley Roquot.
ENOUGH, pro. All there is in the world if you like it.
Enough is as good as a feast--for that matter
Enougher 's as good as a feast and the platter.
Arbely C. Strunk.
ENTERTAINMENT, n. Any kind of amusement whose inroads stop short of
death by dejection.
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 of 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:
We know better the needs of ourselves than of others. To serve oneself
is economy of administration.
In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass, and a nightingale.
Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.
There are three sexes: males, females, and girls.
Beauty in women and distinction in men are alike in this: they seem to
the unthinking a kind of credibility.
Women in love are less ashamed than men. They have less to be ashamed
of.
While your friend holds you affectionately by both your hands you are
safe, for you can watch both his.
Woman would be more charming if one could fall into her arms without
falling into her hands.
Think not to atone for wealth by apology: you must make restitution by a
loan to the accuser.
Study good women and ignore the rest, For he best knows the sex who
knows the best.
Before undergoing a surgical operation arrange your temporal affairs.
You may live.
Intolerance is natural and logical, for in every dissenting opinion lies
an assumption of superior wisdom.
"Who art thou?" said Saint Peter at the Gate.
"I am known as Memory."
"What presumption!--go back to Hell. And who, perspiring friend, art
thou?"
"My name is Satan. I am looking for--"
"Take your penal apparatus and be off."
And Satan, laying hold of Memory, said: "Come along, you scoundrel; you
make happiness wherever you are not."
Self-denial is the weak indulgence of a propensity to forego.
Men talk of selecting a wife; horses of selecting an owner.
You are not permitted to kill a woman that has injured you, but nothing
forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute. You are
avenged 1440 times a day.
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine. A wife is a wine bottle.
He gets on best with women who best knows how to get on without them.
"Who am I?" asked an awakened soul.
"That is the only knowledge that is denied to you here," answered a
smiling angel. "This is Heaven."
Woman's courage is ignorance of danger; man's is hope of escape.
Women of genius commonly have masculine faces, figures, and manners.
In transplanting brains to an alien soil God leaves a little of the
original earth clinging to the roots.
The heels of Detection are sore from the toes of Remorse.
Twice we see Paradise. In youth we name it Life; in age, Youth.
There are but ten Commandments, true, But that's no hardship, friend,
to you; The unmentioned sins that tax your wit You 're not commanded to
commit.
Fear of the darkness is more than an inherited superstition--it is at
night, mostly, that the king thinks.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, but a multitude is as
wise as its wisest member if it obeys him.
"Who art thou?" said Mercy.
"Revenge, the father of Justice."
"Thou wearest thy son's clothing."
"One must be clad."
"Farewell--I go to attend thy son."
"Thou wilt find him hiding in yonder jungle."
When God had finished this terrestrial frame
And all things else, with or without a name,
The nothing that remained within his hand
Said: "Make me into something fine and grand,
Thine angels to amuse and entertain."
God heard and made it into human brain.
If you wish to slay your enemy make haste, O make haste, for already
Nature's knife is at his throat and yours.
To most persons a sense of obligation is insupportable; beware upon whom
you inflict it.
Bear me, good oceans, to some isle
Where I may never fear
The snake alurk in woman's smile,
The tiger in her tear.
Yet bear not with me one, O deeps,
Who never smiles and never weeps.
The ninety-and-nine who most loudly demand opportunity most bitterly
revile the one who has made good use of it.
Life and Death threw dice for a child.
"I win!" cried Life.
"True," said Death, "but you need a nimbler tongue to proclaim your
luck. The child is already dead of age."
How blind is he who, powerless to discern
The glories that about his pathway burn,
Walks unaware the avenues of Dream,
Nor sees the domes of Paradise agleam!
O Golden Age, to him more nobly planned
Thy light lies ever upon sea and land.
From sordid scenes he lifts his soul at will,
And sees a Grecian god on every hill!
In childhood we expect, in youth demand, in manhood hope, and in age
beseech.
EPITAPH, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by
death have a retroactive effect. Following is a touching example:
Here lie the bones of Parson Platt,
Wise, pious, humble, and all that,
Who showed us life as all should live it;
Let that be said--and God forgive it!
ERUDITION, n. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
So wide his erudition's mighty span,
He knew by heart the laws of God and man,
And only came by accident to grief
He thought, poor man, 't was right to be a thief,
Romach Pute.
ESOPHAGUS, n. That part of the alimentary canal that lies between
pleasure and business.
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.
ESSENTIAL, adj. Pertaining to the essence, or that which determines the
distinctive character of a thing. Persons who, because they do not know
the English language, are driven to the unprofitable vocation of
writing for American newspapers, commonly use this word in the sense of
necessary, as, "April rains are essential to June harvests."
ETHNOLOGY, n. The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as
robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots, and ethnologists.
EUCHARIST, n. A sacred feast of the religious sect of Theophagi.
A dispute once unhappily arose among the members of this sect as to what
it was that they ate. In this controversy some five hundred thousand
have already been slain, and the question is still unsettled.
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 the Rt. Rev. Dr. Sprowle,
sometime Bishop of Worcester, entitled, A Partial Definition of the Word
"Everlasting" as Used in the Authorised 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
to 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 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.
Hail high Excess!--especially in wine.
To thee in worship do I bend the knee
Who preach abstemiousness unto me--
My skull thy pulpit, as my paunch thy shrine.
Precept on precept, aye, and line on line,
Could ne'er persuade so sweetly to agree
With reason as thy touch, exact and free,
Upon my forehead and along my spine.
At thy command eschewing pleasure's cup,
With the hot grape I warm no more my wit;
When on thy stool of penitence I sit
I'm quite converted, for I can't get up.
Ungrateful he who afterward would falter
To make new sacrifices at thine altar!
EXCOMMUNICATION, n.
This "excommunication" is a word
In speech ecclesiastical oft heard,
And means the damning, with bell, book, and candle,
Some sinner whose opinions are a scandal--
A rite permitting Satan to enslave him
Forever, and forbidding Christ to save him.
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 mischievous and of no
effect. Following is an extract from an old book entitled, "The Lunarian
Astonished."
-- Pfeiffer & Co., Boston, 1803:
"Lunarian: Then when your Congress has passed a law it goes directly to
the Supreme Court in order that it may at once be known whether it is
constitutional.
"Terrestrian: O no; it does not require the approval of the Supreme
Court until having perhaps been enforced for many years somebody objects
to its operation against himself--I mean his client. The President, if he
approves it, begins to execute it at once.
"Lunarian: Then the executive power is a part of the legislative. Do
your policemen also have to approve the local ordinances that they
enforce?
"Terrestrian: Not yet--at least not in their capacity of constables.
Generally speaking though, all laws require the approval of those whom
they are intended to restrain.
"Lunarian: Ah, I see. The death warrant is not valid until signed by the
murderer.
"Terrestrian: My friend, you put it too strongly; we are not so
consistent.
"Lunarian: But this system of maintaining an expensive judicial
machinery to pass upon the validity of laws only after they have long
been executed, and then only when brought before the court by some
private person--does it not cause great confusion?
"Terrestrian: It does.
"Lunarian: Why then should not your laws, previously to being executed,
be validated, not by the signature of your President, but by that of the
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?
"Terrestrian: There is no precedent for any such course.
"Lunarian: Precedent? What is that?
"Terrestrian: It has been defined by five hundred lawyers in three
volumes each. So how can any one know?"
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 afterward,
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:
"Aug. 3d, 1842. Made a joke on the ex-Isle of Erin. Coldly received. War
with the whole world!"
EXISTENCE, n.
A transient, horrible, fantastic dream,
Wherein is nothing yet all things do seem;
From which we're wakened by a friendly nudge
Of our bedfellow Death, and cry: "O fudge!"
EXPERIENCE, n. The wisdom that enables us to recognize as an undesirable
old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
To one who, journeying through night and fog,
Is mired waist deep in an unwholesome bog,
Experience, like the rising of the dawn,
Shows him the path he never should have gone.
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 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.
Done to a turn on the iron, behold
Him who to be famous aspired.
Content? Well, his grill has a plating of gold,
And his twistings are greatly admired.
Hassan Brubuddy.
FASHION, n. A deity whom the wise ridicule, yet the discreet obey.
A king there was who lost an eye
In some excess of passion;
And straight his courtiers all did try
To follow the new fashion.
Each dropped one eyelid when before
The throne he ventured, thinking
'T would please the king. That monarch swore
He'd slay them all for winking.
What should they do? They were not hot
To hazard such disaster;
They dared not close an eye--dared not
See better than their master.
Seeing them lacrymose and glum,
A leech consoled the weepers:
He spread small rags with liquid gum
And covered half their peepers.
The court all wore the stuff, the flame
Of royal anger dying.
That 's how court-plaster got its name
Unless I'm greatly lying.
Naramy Oof.
FEAST, n. A festival. A religious celebration 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
of 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. Feasts on the dead are celebrated
with great éclat in Fiji. Among the many feasts of the Romans was the
Novemdiale, which was held, according to Livy, whenever stones fell from
heaven. Of all the feast days of the various Christian churches none
has any sanction in the gospel. Men make gods of their bellies, and then
these gods ordain festivals.
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.
The Maker, at Creation's birth,
With living things had stocked the earth.
From elephants to bats and 'snails,
They all were good, for all were males.
But when the Devil came and saw
He said: "By Thine eternal law
Of growth, maturity, decay,
These all must quickly pass away
And leave untenanted the earth
Unless Thou dost establish birth"--
Then tucked his head beneath his wing
To laugh--he had no sleeve--the thing
With deviltry did so accord,
That he'd suggested to the Lord.
The Master pondered this advice,
Then shook and threw the fateful dice
Wherewith all matters here below
Are ordered, and observed the throw;
Then bent His head in awful state,
Confirming the decree of Fate.
From every part of earth anew
The conscious dust consenting flew,
While rivers from their courses rolled
To make it plastic for the mould.
Enough collected (but no more,
For niggard Nature hoards her store)
He kneaded it to flexile clay,
While Nick unseen threw some away.
And then the various forms He cast,
Gross organs first and fine the last;
No one at once evolved, but all
By even touches grew and small
Degrees advanced, till, shade by shade,
To match all living things, He'd made
Females, complete in all their parts
Except (His clay gave out) the hearts.
"No matter," Satan cried; "with speed
I 'll fetch the very hearts they need"--
So flew to Hell and soon brought back
The number needed, in a sack.
That night earth rang with sounds of strife--
Ten million males had each a wife;
That night sweet Peace her pinions spread
O'er Hell--ten million devils dead!