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THE ROYCROFT DICTIONARY
CONCOCTED
_by
Ali Baba and the Bunch
on_
RAINY DAYS
DONE INTO A
PRINTED BOOK BY THE
ROYCROFTERS AT THEIR SHOP FOR
THE DIVERTISEMENT OF
THE GLOOMSTERS
MCMXIV
COPYRIGHT 1914
BY ELBERT HUBBARD
ADVERTISING: The education of the public as to who you are, where you
are, and what you have to offer in way of skill, talent or commodity.
The only man who should not advertise is the man who has nothing to
offer the world in way of commodity or service.
ABEL: The first squealer.
ABHORRENCE: 1. A pronounced feeling of dislike in the presence of what
is superior or unattainable. 2. To discover one's real self and to
slander somebody or something else in revenge. 3. A form of hate that
suffers from _mal de mer_.
ASBESTOS: 1. The white-hope of the damned. 2. A specially prepared paper
upon which _The Philistine_ is printed.
ARSON: To be careless in the use of fire. (General Sherman was at times
more or less careless in the use of fire on his March to the Sea.--_Hon.
Henry W. Grady._)
AERONAUT: A person who goes up in order to come down. Hence, a meta
physician.
ABNORMAL: To have intelligence, character or genius; to be less stupid
than one's neighbor; to be better than the worst; to be one's self. _E.
g._, the writer of these lines.
ABODE: 1. A place where one cleans one's teeth and occasionally sleeps.
2. A long counter with a gutter and a rail at the bottom over which one
is served with any liquid in a glass. 3. Dwelling, fireside (obsolete in
this sense). 4. A grave.
ABNEGATION: A plan for securing the thing in the easiest and surest way.
ACADEMIC: 1. Of, or pertaining to, fossils; vegetative; parasitic; the
opposite of change, viable, evolution. 2. Relating to a society that
promotes the love of the static and the immobile. 3. Apish, parrot-like,
phonographic.
ADIEU: A prayer of thanksgiving uttered at parting.
ACQUAINTANCE: Any one we bow to politely at the opera or shake hands
with warmly in a barroom, but whom we would kick out of our homes.
Hence, any one who has refused us a loan.
ACT: 1. Thought in motion. 2. An actor who says he gets three thousand a
week.
ABYSS: 1. The measureless gulf between literature and the American
magazine. 2. The distance between a thinker and an editorial writer.
ARMY: A body of humanitarians that seeks to impress on another body of
men the beauty of non-resistance, by exterminating them.
ABORIGINE: 1. A natural, unaffected person; one who has no conscience,
who is honest, upright, and always at war. 2. A Deist, a Pantheist, who
sees God in everything and feels His presence everywhere, even in his
cannibalistic rites; hence, the first thinker in any country. 3. One who
hates civilization and the _Ladies' Hum Journal_. 4. Any one who is
mulcted, robbed, murdered, butchered, betrayed, in the name of
progress.
ANARCHIST: 1. A Christian dilettante; one who casts a shadow on tomorrow
while waiting for the Greek Kalends. 2. A mouther of sublime inanities.
3. One who maps and surveys the air and constructs dainty Utopias with
the building-blocks quarried from his unbelievable credulity. 4. In the
insane asylum of idealists, a man who imagines himself to be God. 5. A
militant bourgeois who has deserted both Rome and Reason because he can
not stand competition.
AMERICAN PLAN: A scheme for shortening human life through overeating.
ANANIAS: 1. The first ad-writer. 2. Any person who adapts the truth to
his needs. 3. An ancient Saint George who slew the dragon Truth--hence,
any popular hero or revealer who displays his grinders.
AGRICULTURIST: One who makes his money in town and blows it in the
country.
ANGER: 1. A violent blushing and scampering up and down of the blood
upon hearing the truth about ourselves; an epileptic condition produced
by the presentation of a bill that is not yet due, just due, or overdue.
A sudden tumescence of the ego and a furious exaltation of verbal powers
upon losing a collar-button. 2. Before election, the righteous wrath of
a candidate in the presence of evils that he has invented; after
election-day, his wail in the presence of the grave he did not dig. _E.
g._, The devil (taking final leave of the Lord): "I am in anger with
thee, Sire." The Lord: "For thee, son, 't will be a long time between
heavens. So go to Hell and take thine Anger with thee."
ADMISSION: 1. To lie frankly and truthfully about something that can not
possibly incriminate you. 2. To go into a place where one is not wanted;
as, "A burglar gained admission to my house."
ADMIRATION: 1. The smile of Spite. 2. To secretly wish evil to one who
has given us pleasure. 3. A form of shamefaced flattery. 4. To murder
and go scot-free. _E. g._, "I admire him very much." "Ah, so that is the
reason he has become thoughtful!" From Bean's _Meditations of a
Vegetarian_.
AFTERWARD: A space of time in which something happens after something
else has happened, as, life, death; love, disillusion; riches, gout;
wine, headache; unselfishness, regret.
ASSEMBLY: The Pantheon of the mediocre.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: 1. Auto-intoxication. 2. Things which no one else will
say about you, and which therefore you have to say of yourself.
APOSTLE: 1. A machine for recording a lie. 2. A person who has grown
round-shouldered from following the spoor of another. 3. A lickspittle
needed by philosophers in their business.
ALBANY: 1. A place beyond which Henry Hudson could not go. 2. The lobby
of the White House. 3. Famous in history by the biennial meetings of the
Blackmailers' Club. 4. Any place wherein a capitol is burned at a
pre-established psychological moment. (There is a famous proverb which
says, "Those who are in Albany escaped Sing Sing, and those who are in
Sing Sing were on their way to Albany.")
ATHENS: See Pericles and Aspasia.
ART: 1. The vengeance of the Ideal on the Real. 2. Anything done by a
man or a woman on paper, canvas, marble or a musical keyboard that
people pretend to understand, and sometimes buy. 3. The antithesis of
whatever becomes popular in the cultured world. 4. To cast out the
dragons of virtue and hypocrisy by committing some imaginary sin and
telling the world about it. 5. The beautiful way of doing things. 6. The
expression of a man's joy in his work. 7. A matter of hair-cut and
neckties. 8. The uplifting of the beautiful so that all may see and
enjoy. 9. The utilization of love's exhaust. 10. Love's by-product.
ART-COLLECTOR: A man who operates a morgue for things rich, rare and
precious.
ATHEIST: Any man who does not believe in himself.
ATHLETE MEX: Any man who throws the bull.
ATONEMENT: 1. Embolism of the will. 2. To raise a sin from a vice to a
virtue. 3. A borax that kills the vermin of remorse, but that can not be
relied upon to kibosh their breeding-place. 4. An immunity-bath in
preparation for transgressions to come. (Among certain religious sects,
the Day of Atonement is the day on which all gonofs line up for a fresh
start.)
ATTENTION: Concentration of the mind on whatever will ultimately put
something in the pocket; hence, in law and politics, the frame-up.
BACK: 1. That part of the body to which your friend directs his remarks
when he tells you the truth. 2. A smooth surface composed of skin and
bones which stretches between Land's End and John O'Groat's.
BAL-MASQUE: The coronation of Mephisto.
BALIVORAX: A Battle Creek Bellifiller, made from selected fidoes,
fuddies, fresh freddies, chibots and chitterlings. Ladies love it,
babies cry for it, and men who eat it are loved by the ladies who love
it who have babies who cry for it. This is the filler fidgeted for by
Juno before she weaned Hercules--who was no bottle-baby--and fed to him
afterward. Ask your Bagpiper and take no other.
BEATITUDE: A rare and evanescent mental state caused by the reception of
money that one has not earned. Synonyms: Windfall, remittance.
BEGGAR: A robber who has lost his nerve--a bandit with a streak of
yellow in his ego.
BIDDLE: The act of introducing a prizefight in a Sunday School.
BILLYSUNDAY: 1. A theological jumping-jack, jerked by financial strings.
2. Any one with a pious emotional jag. 3. Hypnosis at so much per. 4. A
person intent on saving his soul by religious rigmarole at the expense
of reason. 5. To paddle away to Paradise in an orthodox canoe, and feel
happy in the thought that most of the folks on the Big Ship are going to
Hell.
BLOOMINGDALE: A condition of mind.
BASTARD: Any man who doubts his own immaculate conception.
BEAN: A dynamic spheroid, combustible under certain conditions.
BLABERINO: Any person who tells a person something a person says about
him, which puts fishbones in the throat and brickbats in the Ostermoor
of the person told.
BOOTY: 1. Whatever belongs to somebody that really belongs to somebody
else, or whatever belongs to somebody else that really belongs to you or
ought to belong to you if it did not belong to a third party--hence,
anything at all. 2. Property in a transitional stage.
BAPTISM: Hydrocephalic abracadabra.
BARD: Anciently a poet; now a Poet-Laureate.
BOREDOM: 1. The essential nature of monogamy. 2. A period or rest
between I Did and I Will. 3. A state of divine revelation wherein for a
single moment we are carried by the giant of Eternal Inutility to the
abysms and summits of the perpetual Nix. (The word _boredom_ comes from
Bore, a tired son of Noah. After the subsidence of the waters, Bore
wandered about the earth, yawning and gaping and stretching, for at that
time malaria oozed from many stagnant pools. Finally, absolutely
exhausted, Bore, being afraid to be down on the damp and slimy soil,
rested on the seventh day on his own bean, hence boredom.)
BUGHOUSE: 1. A condition of mind (See Boston) 2. The place where a
person without funds is sent under certain conditions.
BUSINESS: Looking a payroll in the eye and kiting checks. 2. A method of
reducing a landlady to her lowest terms.
BUSINESSMAN: One who gets the business and completes the
transaction--all the rest are clerks and laborers.
BUTLER: 1. A Person or Thing that has charge of the servants in a house
belonging to another Person or Thing. 2. A tyrant without ears, eyes,
organs, dimensions, passions.
BRAIN: A commodity as scarce as radium and more precious, used to
fertilize ideas.
BOHEMIA: A good place in which to camp, but a very poor place in which
to settle down.
BREAD: A foodstuff which the rich occasionally give to the poor as a
substitute for cake.
CANNIBAL: 1. The conceiver and first practitioner of the eucharistic
rite. 2. A place where a missionary may have a hell of a time. 3. A
Pierrot whose pranks are side-splitting. 4. One who appreciates his
fellow-being at his true worth. 5. The most subtle of living ironists.
6. Any one who takes his brother man at his physical valuation.
CARELESSNESS: 1. To have an eye on Eternity, wherein nothing matters. 2.
To do a thing in the manner of a god who throws dice for the birth or
death of a universe. 3. To perform an act wisely, but not too well.
COURTESY: 1. The court clothes of any two-legged predatory animal. 2.
The oil that makes a juggernaut noiseless.
CHUMS: A condition of sophomorish propinquity that precedes a feud. (See
furse and vendetta.) A state of chumminess between persons of opposite
sex and suitable ages is more or less in the line of Nature. But that
can't-get-along-without-you feeling between persons of the same sex is a
form of hate and means that some third party is going to be beaned.
CIRCUMSTANCE: 1. The fresh banana-peel just around the corner. 2.
_Ex-post-facto_ knowledge of a series of incidents, episodes and laws
which, had we known before doing something that we should not have done
anyhow, we would have done otherwise, in the same way, or not at all. 3.
The Shadowy Iago that follows us up and down life's promenades. 4. Man
Friday to Chance.
CEREBELLUM: 1. The knapsack of Intelligence. 2. The _pons asinorum_
between the mind and the cabeza. 3. A place whence, in democracies,
politicians draw their strength, and in monarchies where the masses
manufacture bombs and guillotines. _E. g._, "Now suppose," began
Professor Sapnoodle, "that a tiny elevator ran up the spine; we should
then call the cerebellum the ceiling of the basement."
CHARITY: 1. A thing that begins at home, and usually stays there. 2.
Bracing up Ralph Waldo Emerson's reputation by attributing to him
literary mousetraps which he should have made, but didn't. (See Cheese.)
CHILDREN: Exquisite caskets of flesh that hold the scrolls of all our
deeds.
CHAUFFEUR: The power behind the thrown.
CHEEK: 1. A drip-pan for tears. 2. Anciently, a part of the face;
latterly, among women, the subsoil of rouge. 3. The principal asset of
Ex-President Bombastes Furioso.
CHEF: The Messiah of gluttons; a Borgia of the scullery; one who
crochets sweetbreads instead of cooking them.
CHALK: A deposit found at the top, bottom and middle and in the space
between the bottom and middle and between the middle and top of American
literature. (Chalk-line, used generally in the phrase, "to walk a
chalk-line"; _E. g._, the shortest way to reach the poor-house is to
walk the chalk-line of probity).
CLIQUE: Friendship gone to seed.
COMMITTEE: A thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in
an hour.
CHRISTIAN: 1. One of a sect that despises and rejects the race from
which its founder sprang. 2. A person who thinks he believes in a
certain creed that he does not believe in, and thus is pied mentally,
morally and arithmetically. 3. A man who keeps one day in the week holy
and raises hell with folks and fauna the other six--sometimes.
CHURCH: A place where the Anointed of the Lord palm themselves off on
one another. 2. A hall of echoes. 3. A counterpane for the dead. 4. An
edifice wherein inspired fogyism gets its final degree.
CHICAGO TONGUE: A lengthening of the unruly member to a hammer-like
proportion.
CONSCIENCE: 1. The muzzle of the will. 2. The Pecksniffian mask of the
fundamental Bill Sykes. 3. The aspiration of Rosinante to be Pegasus.
CHURCH UNITY: Joining my church.
CIGARETTIST: One who is late every morning and fresh every evening.
CITY: 1. Any place where men have builded a jail, a bagnio, a gallows, a
morgue, a church, a hospital, a saloon, and laid out a cemetery--hence a
center of life. 2. A herding region; any part of the earth where
ignorance and stupidity integrate, agglomerate and breed.
CIVILIZATION: A device for increasing human ills; a machine for the
perpetuation of the weak; an ingenious contraption for spreading disease
and hunger. (See war, harlot, politician, liar, Teddy, Sulzer, Murphy,
hypocrisy, newspaper, forger, jail, policemen, lawyer, walking delegate,
capitalist, poverty, clergyman.) _E. g._, "Do you believe in
civilization?" "Yep." From _The Confessions of Herr Krupp_.
COMMONSENSE: The ability to detect values--to know a big thing from a
little one. (I'd rather possess Commonsense than to have six degrees
from Oxford.--_Fingy Conners' Confessions._)
CLOCK: 1. A telltale; a gossip; a blab. 2. A chink through which the
Greta Secret leaks. 3. The Big Ben of eternity.
COFFIN: 1. L'Envoi, the end of the legend. 2. An ornamental candy-box
which no one cares to open. 3. A room without a door or a skylight.
COLLEGE: A place where you have to go in order to find out that there is
nothing in it. (See Marriage.)
COLLEGE DEGREE: A social disgenic, as compared with proof of competence.
COMIC: Tragedy viewed from the wings.
COMPETITION: 1. The struggle for a cake of ice in hell. 2. The life of
trade, and the death of the trader.
CHIMERIC: To follow the right and get left. _E. g._, A. He was chimeric.
B. All the same, he went to the Chair like a man.
CONCOCTION: 1. An imaginative mosaic distinguished from a lie in this,
that a lie is "made up" and a concoction is "put together." 2. A social,
religious, economic or political allegory, dogma, creed or program which
lands some one in power and flattens out those who believe in it. 3. A
mixture of dream and reality, sometimes called "Universe" or "World,"
put together by two strolling Super-Gentlemen Adventurers, sometimes
known as God and Satan.
CONFIDENCE: The one big lesson the world needs most to learn.
CONSERVATIVE: One who is opposed to the things he is in favor of.
COMPLIMENT: A sarcastic remark with a flavor of truth or not, as the
case may be.
CONSOLE: To stab one in pain with the bare bodkin of pity.
CONTRADICTION: 1. Two lies disputing the roadway. 2. A head-on collision
in which two trains of thought telescope each other.
COQUETRY: 1. An eye-shade worn by lubricity. 2. The colored glasses of
The-Thing-Itself. 3. The death-tumbrel that Passion builds for its
dreams.
CONSCIOUSNESS: A state wherein one becomes aware that he is being
robbed, swindled or duped, by either a natural or an artificial law.
Aside from his periods of sleep it may be said that man is always in a
state of consciousness when voting, making love, or when succumbing to
any other form of hypnotic suggestion.
CONVERSION: 1. To be suddenly seized by fright before a fiction or a
fact. 2. To execute a mental and moral pirouette from one absurdity to a
worse one. 3. To exhaust one pleasure and seek redemption in another. 4.
A backslider from your own ideas to those of an inferior.
CO-OPERATION: Doing what I tell you to do, and doing it quick.
COURAGE: 1. A matter of the red corpuscle. 2. A matter of getting used
to it. (It is oxygen that makes every attack, and without oxygen in his
blood to back him, a man attacks nothing--not even a pie.--From Wilbur
Nesbit's book _Bunc as I Have Found It_.)
CREED: A metaphor with ankylosis--a figure of speech frozen stiff with
fright.
CURIOSITY: 1. A gulf that swallows gods, men, creeds, matter, worlds,
philosophies. 2. A peephole in the brain through which one sees the
pomp and ceremony of the Absurd. 3. A monstrous antenna that feels its
way through matter and mind, and founders in the Infinite. 4. At its
lowest, the instinct that boosts us up to peep over our neighbor's
transom, symboled by a knot-hole.
CRITICS: Men who quarrel over the motive of a book that never had any.
CRIMINAL: One who does by illegal means what all the rest of us do
legally.
CROMWELL (OLIVER): The father of Nell Gwynn.
CREDIT: The lifeblood of commerce.
CASTE: A Chinese Wall that deprives you of the society of sensible
people.
CAIN: The first progressive.
CREATOR: A man possessing initiative.
DAWN: 1. The beginning of a daily instalment in a serial story that will
never end. 2. That mystical hour wherein Dives goes belching into
dreamland and Lazarus comes out yawning carrying a dinner-pail.
DEATH: 1. To stop sinning suddenly. 2. To resign one's membership in the
Ananias Club. 3. A readjustment of life's forces.
DEBT: 1. A rope to your foot, cockleburs in your hair, and a clothespin
on your tongue. 2. The devil in disguise.
DEMAGOGUE: One whose highest ambition is to stand on the grave of a
great dead industry and boast to an army of unemployed of his bloody
deeds.
DECALOGUE: 1. The stakes that hold in its place the social circus-tent.
2. A collection of commandments formulated by a person who has broken
them all. 3. An incubator in which eaglets are transformed into capons.
4. A fence that confines animals that can not climb or fly. (The most
famous Decalogue is known as the Ten Commandments. Whoso has obeyed this
Decalogue in toto has died obscure, poor, unsung, unwept, and overlooked
by Clio.)
DOGMA: 1. A hard substance which forms in a soft brain; a coprolitic
idea; a lie imperiously reiterated and authoritatively injected into the
mind of one or more persons who believe they believe what some one else
believes. 2. A paying thought or doctrine. 3. A recession into the
Divine or Imperial--hence, the father of graft.
DEMOCRACY: 1. A form of government by popular ignorance. 2. The dwarf's
paradise. 3. Any political system where male votes are substitutes for
brains. (This word comes from the Abracadabra: "demo," lungs; "crazy,"
to rule; hence, to rule by caloric.)
DENNIS: The man who expresses the things he thinks other folks think he
thinks.
DOLLAR: A disk of metal which has eucharistic qualities; a sacred,
miraculous object, contact with which is looked upon as curative and
prophylactic.
DIARY: 1. To see one's self as no one else cares to see us. 2. A book
that describes the birth, effulgence and disappearance of pimples. 3.
The lavatory of literature.
DIPLOMACY: An endeavor to side-step Nemesis.
DIPLOMAT: A man who says "perhaps" when he means no, as opposed to a
woman who says "perhaps" when she means yes. (A man who says "no" is not
a diplomat, and a woman who says "yes" is not a lady.)
DIGNITY: 1. A state of spiritual, mental or emotional starchiness that
precedes a bluff. 2. A sartorial and tonsorial _chef-d'oeuvre_. 3. The
bodily attitude of a speaker or a preacher in the presence of people
whose duty it is to believe he is not lying to them. 4. A mask we wear
to hide our ignorance. (Man has dignity, woman has poise, animals have
power; hence, dignity in a man or woman is anything that is a substitute
for power.)
DISAPPOINTMENT: 1. The cradle of the ideal. 2. The skeleton of Purpose
and the skull and crossbones of Desire. 3. A feeling in regard to the
past that comes to every one on the Thirty-first of each December. 4.
The final issue of any act begun yesterday, today or tomorrow. 5. The
original road to Damascus and Horeb. 6. An alluvium deposited by the
waves of Time in the human soul, and which becomes the basis of
psychological Mont Blancs.
DISCORD: A guinea-hen, a peacock and a bluejay singing a trio.
DISADVANTAGE: Having too many advantages in life.
DEVIL: A god who has been bounced for conduct unbecoming a gentleman.
DOCTOR: 1. A person who has taken seriously the biblical injunction,
"Physician, heel thyself!" 2. In Germany, a swashbuckler person with
many scars, much admired by small boys and unhappily married ladies, and
feared by shopkeepers.
DISINTERESTED: 1. Whatever is inconceivable. 2. A hypothetical ether
that surrounds all forms of selfishness and naturalness. 3. That
psychological interval when we look the other way before making a grab.
4. A monkey's mental attitude toward the hen.
DISHONORABLE: 1. To avoid infamy and almost attain respectability. 2.
The first feeling we entertain toward each new acquaintance. 3. Any
action whatsoever committed by a competitor.
DUTY: A pleasure which we try to make ourselves believe is a hardship.
DIVORCE: 1. A legal separation of two persons of the opposite sex who
desire to respect and honor each other. 2. A marital derail.
DIVORCEE: 1. A female fugitive from injustice. 2. Any lady who is a
Post-Graduate in Love's Correspondence-School.
DISCONTENT: 1. Inertia on a strike. 2. The mainspring of progress. 3.
The starting-point in every man's career.
DISINHERIT: 1. The prankish action of the ghosts in cutting the pockets
out of trousers. 2. To leave great sums of money to lawyers. 3. A method
of insuring postmortem notoriety--and disappointment.
DOUBTER: 1. One who picks his teeth, blows his nose on his napkin, and
yawns at the Lord's table. 2. A good-for-nothing who does not knock
before entering the bathroom of the Faithful.
DREAM: 1. A place where the starving feel the pangs of gluttony, and the
threadbare wear opera-hats and spats. 2. A magic mirror wherein the dead
appear to mock us with their happiness. 3. A cerebral phenomenon caused
on upper Fifth Avenue by eating too much, and on the lower East Side by
eating too little. 4. The Valhalla and the Welsh Rabbit; the Brocken
where the souls of the animals, fish and birds we have eaten hold their
revels; a private theater where indigestion is the prompter.
DUCHESS: The feminine of Dutchman.
DYNAMO: Any man who has everything he eats, drinks, smokes and wears,
charged.
EARTH: 1. A small bean-shaped planet, full of noise, nonsense and
noddies, created in order to swell the pockets of politicians. 2. A
blister produced by the constant abrasion of motion against space.
EAT: 1. To prolong pain; to satisfy the anticipatory pleasure of hunger;
to deliberately plan the contamination of the drinking-water of a
people. 2. The demagogic demands of the belly. 3. A sinful or
extravagant act among the destitute. 4. A sacred rite among the rich. 5.
An artificial aid to conversation and the repetition of threadbare
stories, generally off-color.
EDUCATION: A form of self-delusion by those who muff every good wheeze.
ECONOMICS: The science of the production, distribution and use of
wealth, best understood by college professors on half-rations.
EDITOR: 1. A person employed on a newspaper, whose business it is to
separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
2. A delicate instrument for observing the development and flowering of
the deadly mediocre and encouraging its growth. 3. A seraphic embryon; a
smooth bore; a bit of sandpaper applied to all forms of originality by
the publisher-proprietor; an emictory.
ENEMY: 1. A counter-irritant of which you must get a few, or it's you
for fatty degeneration of the cerebrum. 2. The friend who stings you
into action. 3. Any one who tells the truth about you.
EMPHASIS: To italicize a lie; to lay great stress on certain sounds that
emanate from a larynx and that are intended to hypnotize a tympanum; to
be impressive to the point of almost believing ourselves; the double
chin of a declarative sentence; oratorical moth-balls.
ENNUI: 1. The fourth dimension of action. 2. The looking-glass of the
Infinite. 3. A state of time wherein seconds become days and hours
become years. 4. A shop that contains nothing but a silent salesman,
Death.
EPIGRAM: 1. A vividly expressed truth that is so, or not, as the case
may be. 2. A dash of wit and a jigger of wisdom, flavored with surprise.
ENTHUSIASM: The great hill-climber.
EQUITABLE: An ironical term meaning you can fool some of the people all
the time.
EQUITY: Simply a matter of the length of the judge's ears.
EUCHARIST: Salvation by the pound, or by the pint. (If one should eat,
say, a pound of eucharistic chips and drink two quarts of the holy water
a day, one would be cleansed of all sin and be much richer in bacteria.)
ETERNITY: 1. The Sunday of Time. 2. The sublimest thought of the brain
of Ignorance. 3. A symphony written by a Beethoven of the ineffable _x_
dimension. 4. The North Pole of the hours. 5. Monstrance of the Holy O.
6. A corrosive acid that obliterates Before and Afterward.
EMANCIPATED MAN: One who has dared to think for himself, and thus has
added to his list of enemies.
EVOLUTION: 1. A word that has reclassified in an entertaining manner our
impermeable and eternal ignorance. 2. The growth of a thing from the
simple to the complex, and the wasting away of the complex until it is
simpler than ever. 3. The one superstition that is cordially hated by
theologues.
EVERYBODY: 1. The square root of zero. 2. The leavings of individuality.
3. An agglomeration of bipeds who subsist on one another's shanks. 4.
The Seventh Heaven of stupidity. 5. The cosmos of the pinhead. 6. Nobody
in toto. 7. The collective and organized wisdom of the lowest forms of
animal intelligence.
EXPECTANCY: An exciting interval between rounds.
EXPECTATION: 1. An optimistic feeling about an event that will never
occur. 2. The secret of the persecution of the Jews, Christians and
Mohammedans by one another. 3. The Goddess of Love. Synonyms: Tomorrow,
next week, next year, next century, pretty soon--any imaginary space of
time after the present moment.
EXISTENCE: 1. A metaphysical term which originally meant joy, but which
since the beginning of the Christian era has come to mean pain. 2. To be
(used only in the phrase "to be damned"). 3. Merely to live, without
eating or drinking. (In London, Paris and New York, this phenomenon is
quite common.)
EXPERIENCE: 1. The germ of power. 2. The name every one gives his
mistakes. 3. Stinging and getting stung.
EXPRESSION: 1. That mode of creation by which we coin things out of our
hearts. (Nothing is of any value except that which you create for
yourself, and no joy is joy save as it is the joy of self-expression.)
2. Mind speaking through its highest instrument, Man.
EYE: 1. An organ of the human body which sees the universe as it is not,
and transmits the same to the brain. 2. The soul's feelers and pickers.
EYEBALL: 1. A small, miraculous globe that has the power to fabulize the
external universe. 2. The spectacles of the brain; the peephole of
consciousness.
EPITAPH: 1. Postponed compliments. 2. Postmortem bull-con. 3. Qualifying
for the Ananias Club.
EUROPEAN: An inhabitant of New York City.
EXECUTIVE: A man who can make quick decisions and is sometimes right.
FARMER: 1. A man who raises early feed for potato-bugs. 2. One who
supplies raw stock for vaudeville jokes. 3. A man who makes his money in
the country and blows it in when he comes to town. (Farms were first
devised as an excuse for the Agricultural Department at Washington.)
FAILURE: 1. The man who can tell others what to do and how to do it, but
never does it himself. 2. A man who has blundered, but is not able to
cash in the experience.
FASHION: A barricade behind which men hide their nothingness.
FAME: To have your name paged by the "buttons" of a fashionable hotel.
FAITH: 1. The effort to believe that which your commonsense tells you is
not true. 2. The first requisite in success.
FAKE: An event that occurs every four years in the United States; hence,
by extension, anything popular.
FAMILY LINE: The clothes-line.
FAST TRAIN: One that has no diner.
FEAR: 1. A club used by priests, presidents, kings and policemen to keep
the people from recovering stolen goods. 2. The thought of admitted
inferiority. 3. The rock on which we split.
FEATHERS: Secondary sex advertisements made of fiber and horsetails, and
used on ladies' lids as eye-gougers and such.
FEUD: A fool idea fanned into flame by a fool friend.
FEMINIST MOVEMENT: 1. A hot desire to step on the male tumble-bug. 2. An
uneasy, eccentric, patho-psychio gyration, caused by disappointment or
thwarted ambition. 3. A loose cam or a cosmic monkeywrench in the
convolutions.
FIFTH AVENUE: 1. The widow's chance. 2. A rabbit-warren. 3. The
underworld of the upper world. (Fifth Avenue begins at the Washington
Arch and really ends at Fifty-ninth Street. Above Fifty-ninth Street one
goes into the sacred precincts of monasteries and nunneries. In this
district the inhabitants are divided into two classes: those who barely
live and those who live barely.)
FLY: A sententious, epigrammatic stylist who puts a period after each
utterance.
FOLDEROL: Talk or conversation of any kind between a man and a woman
that does not contain an invitation or a promise.
FORBEARANCE: 1. To forgive an enemy who has been shorn of power. 2. To
buy golden opinions of one's self. 3. To slay with irony or pity.
FORECAST: To observe that which has passed, and guess it will happen
again; to anticipate the future by guessing at the past; to predict that
an event will happen, if it does, by basing calculations on events that
have already happened, if they did. (One may forecast and be right,
wrong, or neither. It depends.)
FIRST REQUISITES: 1. Belief in yourself. 2. Pride in your work. 3.
Useful hands, clear eyes, and a good breath.
FOREHEAD: 1. The facade of a cosmic bagnio. 2. A screen that hides the
obscene. 3. The ramparts of a portable Bastile.
FORTITUDE: That quality of mind which does not care what happens so long
as it does not happen to us.
FORUM: A safety-valve for letting out superfluous air. _E. g._, "Let the
Forum always be open to the people, and let the treasury always be open
to us."--From Titus Livy's _Psychology of the First Contractor_.
FRA: A literary silo that feeds the world.
FRAME-UP: See Brandeisism in the last edition of the _Century
Dictionary_.
FRIENDSHIP: 1. Something that by any other name would be as brittle. 2.
A tacit agreement between two enemies to work together for common swag.
3. The aspiration to boredom. 4. To do unto some one that which you
would not allow him to do unto you.
FRIEND: The masterpiece of Nature.
FRAT: 1. A scheme whereby you lock the world out by shutting yourself
in. 2. A non-productive plan of self-incarceration in a brain bastile by
a mental midge of either sex, or none. 3. A make-believe compact for
purposes of piffle. (See snip-pity, top-lofty, tabascoish,
supercilious.)
GAIETY: 1. An effervescence of spirits produced by the expectation or
the receipt of money. 2. The emotion of a poor person on learning of the
death of a rich relative.
GALLANT: 1. To remember one is a gentleman in spite of one's birth and
training. 2. To give up your seat in a car to a woman, and tread on your
neighbor's foot to get even. 3. To do a perfectly unselfish act from
selfish motives.
GENT: A chauffeur who has a cab-driver for a chum.
GENTLEMAN: One who is gentle toward the friendless.
GLORY: The five senses of the dead.
GENIUS: 1. One who offends his time, his country and his relatives;
hence, any person whose birthday is celebrated throughout the world
about one hundred years after he has been crucified, burned, ostracized
or otherwise put to death. 2. One who stands at both ends of a
perspective; simultaneity of sight; to be one's self plus; to be synonym
and antonym to everything. 3. The ability to act wisely without
precedent--the power to do the right thing for the first time. 4. A
capacity for evading hard work.
GIVETH: The lisping tense of give. _E. g._, "He giveth His beloved
sleep."--From _The Ironic Sayings of Jehovah_.
GOSSIP: 1. Vice enjoyed vicariously--the sweet, subtle satisfaction
without the risk. 2. The lack of a worthy theme.
GLUTTON: A poor man who eats too much, as contradistinguished from a
gourmand, who is a rich man who "lives well."
GOD: 1. The John Doe of philosophy and religion. 2. The first atheist.
3. A puzzle-editor.
GOD AND SATAN: The Pathe Freres of existence.
GODDESS: A Super-Huzzy mated with an apotheosized Super-Thug.
GOOD HABITS: Mentors and servants that regulate your sleep, your work
and your thought.
GOOD SPORT: A man whose soul is equipped with automatic lubrication.
GOOD LUCK: Tenacity of purpose.
GOVERNMENT: A kind of legalized pillage.
GOURMAND: A rich man who eats the surplus production of the world's
foodstuffs that the starving are too niggardly to purchase.
GRAMMAR: The grave of letters.
GRAFT: An agrarian expression first used by Ali Baba.
GUESSWORK: A shallow depression, pit, or cavity in the consciousness of
an editorial writer when he is warning the people.
GREAT MAN: One who perceives the unseen, and knows the obvious.
GUTTER: The Lourdes of the puritanical mind, where it finds what it
seeks.
GROUCHERINO: One whose life is just one dam kick after another.
GRATITUDE: A lively sense of anticipation concerning favors about to be
received.
GUMMA: A substance that forms in the cabeza by an overindulgence in mint
juleps; hence, to become a Super-Brute or a political Has-Been.
GRIEF: 1. The telescope of the emotions that unfolds to your eye the
meaning of all worlds. 2. The overtones in all joy. 3. The pleasure that
lasts the longest. 4. The tears of Memory. 5. The vice of weakness and
the virtue of strength.
HAPPINESS: 1. Something that might have happened yesterday, but which
will never happen tomorrow. 2. A postprandial state of mind, which is
most often a presage of acute gastritis. 3. A loving-cup, the bottom of
which is like a sieve. 4. A mental state compounded of wine, women and
tobacco. 5. The exploitation and final triumph of an instinct in the
individual that society has branded as wicked or dangerous. 6.
Forgetting self in useful effort. 7. A habit--cultivate it.
HABIT: The buffer of our feelings; the armor that protects our
nerve-force; the great economizer of energy.
HEART: An organ in the human body whence comes the impulse to get
divorced.
HAGGIS: The quintessence of all that has been said by all the
Presidents, Governors, and Mayors in the United States since Eighteen
Hundred Eighty-nine.
HAND: 1. A conventionalized bread-hook. 2. An attachment at the end of
the human arm which gives to another a lemon, or something that the
owner of the arm can no longer use or that is harmful to him.
HAIR: The Olympus of the pediculidæ.
HEAVEN: 1. The Coney Island of the Christian imagination. 2. Largely a
matter of digestion. 3. An orphan asylum where institutionalism reigns.
4. A penitential colony where the virtuous and the good are condemned to
eternal fellowship for their stupidities uttered on earth.
HATE: 1. The shoal on which our bark is stranded. 2. A habit.
HAS-BEEN: Any man who thinks he has arrived.
HELL: 1. A Papal bull. 2. An extinct volcano. 3. The Pantheon of the
brave. 4. An ancient conflagration that was checked when Voltaire
invented the asbestos intellect. 5. A theological corn, wart or tumor.
6. The sense of separateness. 7. Three telephone systems in a town. 8.
An invitation to go sightseeing. _E. g._, "If I'd only had a parachute
at the time I would have gone to hell gracefully and taken a record for
descent."--From Lucifer's _Confessions of a Ticket-o'-Leave Man_.
HUSBAND: A booby prize in life's lottery.
HELTA-SKELTA: The new substitute for Strenuosity. Puts you to sleep
while you work. Helta-Skelta is a prepossessing product made from
posthole polyglot piecrust, and is warranted free from teddine, swaboda,
korona, kabo and karezza. Served face to face with cream or without, it
is spit out as soon as chewed, and can not be swallowed. Locate the
lavatory and try a free sample.
HEN: The only animal in Nature that can lay around and make money.
HIGHBROW: 1. A person who has grown so wise that the obvious escapes
him. 2. One who reveres knowledge with superstitious awe, and whose
worship of observation approaches the ecstatic. 3. One who believes that
an atom is a monstrance that conceals the Holy Ghost of Force.
HIGHFLYER: Any man who rides on the running-board, when he might just as
well be inside the limousine.
HISTORY: 1. A collection of epitaphs. 2. Gossip well told.
HOME: 1. A place where we go to change our clothes so as to go somewhere
else. 2. The abode of the heart.
HUMOR: The tabasco sauce that gives life a flavor.
HUMILITY: 1. The slippered patience of the disinherited. 2. The
grogginess of the Ego. 3. To recede to the very bottom of one's own
littleness. 4. The Marseillaise of the disappointed. 5. The odor of
sanctity. 6. An Iago in plush and lavender. 7. Pride getting ready for a
Pounce.
HONEYMOON: 1. A happiness not quite worn out. 2. A postlude to a
wedding-march and a prelude to a funeral ditto. _E. g._, "I did not
drive Adam and Eve out of Eden because they ate my pet pippin, but
because they insisted on carrying on their honeymoon before the modest
animals."--From _The Private Journal of Démiurge_.
HOPE: 1. A substitute for yesterday. 2. A mask that dying persons wear.
3. A system of metaphysics founded by Ananias. Antonyms: Reason,
imagination, experience.
HOUSE: 1. A building with four walls and a roof. 2. A rendezvous for
burglars. 3. A dormitory for servants. 4. The Mecca of bedbugs. (The
difference between a house and a home is this: A house may fall down,
but a home is broken up.)
HUMAN LOVE: The one indestructible thing in Nature.
HUMAN DYNAMO: Any man who gets everything charged.
IDEAL: 1. The dreams of a sin to come. 2. The mirage of failure. 3. The
venom of the lost. 4. An excuse for murder, tyranny or for
self-aggrandizement. 5. Any theory that justifies our secret itch.
IDEALIST: 1. A glassblower. 2. A somnambulist who insists on stepping
out of a solid window into the air. 3. A person who lives in a tower of
porcelain and dines on pumpernickel and lobscouse. 4. A man who fills
his gasoline-tank with attar of roses and expects the motor to run.
INTELLIGENCE: The grand inquisitor that tortures from every truth the
confession that it lies, and from every lie a confession of its divine
necessity.
IDEAL LIFE: Man's normal life, as we shall some day know it.
IF: 1. A tightrope that stretches from But to But. 2. A small, magical,
automatic hinge that can swing the doors of Chance in any direction. 3.
A fatality endowed with free will. 4. The verbal sword of Damocles. 5. A
dizzy precipice at the end of every declarative sentence. 6. A pole
around which the future and the past play hide-and-seek. 7. The vorspiel
to the piker's threnody. _E. g._ (Scene: a narrow bridge.): "Let me
pass, fellow! my name is Must, and I desire to cross." If (standing in
the middle of the bridge): "You damn fool, don't you see I am the end of
the bridge? There is no Must nor Might that can go beyond me."
IMITATION: The sincerest form of insult.
IGNORAMUS: Any man who flatters himself that he is educated.
IMAGINATION: 1. A marvelous little multicolored drugget that covers the
rough and splintered floor of reality. 2. A haunted chateau. 3. A
vestibule between Time and Eternity. 4. The giant enemy of reality. 5.
The red Pantheon of Lucifer. 6. The candle-gleam of science; the
flambeau of the lover; the constellated nebulæ of the poet. 7. The
glittering west-dust of a hidden innominate sun. 8. The seigniory of
untrammeled instincts; the fief of unsanctified dreams; the palfrey that
carries us toward nebulous spiritual hills. 9. The plasma of gods. 10.
Puck strapped to the back of Balaam's ass. 11. The Shakespeare of mental
faculties. 12. The avatar of the emotions. 13. A golden key that unlocks
the bastile of logic. 14. A ladder to the fourth dimension. 15. A
sublime liar. 16. Taking the halter off your thoughts and giving them a
good kick behind. 17. Sympathy illumined by brains.
IMITATOR: A man who succeeds in being an imitation.
IMMORTALITY: 1. A reward given to infidels and atheists by a somewhat
humorous God, for not groveling before Him and annoying Him with
importunities. 2. A system of punishment for suicides, which makes
suicide impossible, thereby putting one over on the ingrate who was
tired of the gift of life, by compelling him to live forever,
willy-nilly. 3. A valueless thing, because unlimited in quantity, which
those hotly intent upon achieving will forfeit through the law which
provides that that for which we clutch we lose. 4. A condition sought by
political officeholders where the incumbent never either dies or
resigns. 5. A state of being encouraged by annuitants, and those who
live in the Garden of Allah-Money. 6. A flimflam offer by a theologian
of inchoate title to improved real estate in the Sky for real estate,
rentals and cash on Earth. 7. A doctrine that the rich teach the poor
for good and sufficient reasons. 8. Divine Compensation for the
starving. 9. A superfluous addition to life; to go on living after one
desires and hopes to remain dead.
INDEPENDENCE: An achievement, not a bequest.
IMPERIALISM: Tyranny, hiding behind the sacred name of Humanity.
INFIDEL: One who defames his Creator and impeaches his own reason by
believing in Orthodox Christianity.
INFIDELITY: To remain faithful to one's self, and to be unfaithful to
some one else's faith. In religion, to think; in the marriage
institution, to fall in love; in business, to do the thing to the other
fellow that the other fellow intends to do to you, and do it first.
ISSUE: In physiology, something that comes up and out; in politics,
something that goes down and in.
INGRATITUDE: 1. A girl who is too busy to acknowledge receipt of a
Christmas present. 2. The portion of the man who has done well; and a
fight with the fox you have warmed into life is imminent.
INFUSORIA: The entire human race with the exception of Homer, Richard
Wagner, Dante, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Rodin, Raphael, Æschylus,
Shakespeare, Schopenhauer and Edward Bok, in whose tremendous skulls we
live and move and have our being, like a whirlwind of germs in the vats
of the Absolute.
INGRATE: Any person who has got something for nothing, and wants more on
the same terms.
INITIATIVE: Doing the right thing without being told.
IRONY: The cactus-plant that sprouts over the tomb of our dead
illusions.
JUDICIOUS: 1. A state of mind wherein things are weighed in an
imponderable scale; a conjunction of two negatives in a void. 2. To be
wanting in foolishness, character or brains. 3. An exquisite and
delicate perception of the difference between two things that are
exactly alike, or the total unlikeness between two things that are
absolutely different. 4. An umbrella to be carried on clear days as well
as on rainy ones, thus protecting the possessor from everything. 5. To
lie flat on your puss while the juggernaut of Opinion goes over you; to
stand perfectly still between two streetcars going in opposite
directions. 6. To see what's coming and avoid it by taking all sides.
JOURNALIST: A newspaperman out of a job.
JURY: 1. The stupidity of one brain multiplied by twelve. 2. A
collection of sedentary owls. 3. The humble apology of Civilization to
Savagery. _E. g._, "Whatever exists may be touched, but a jury is an
exception to this universal law--it must be reached."
JUSTICE: A system of revenge where the State imitates the criminal.
JOHN DOUGH PROCEEDINGS: A hunt for graftheimers.
JUDGE: 1. A man with ankylosis of the ego, who is jealous of the
stenographer for sufficient reasons. 2. One who learns law from lawyers
and is excluded from the game, getting his in honors.
KING: 1. In the presence of genius, a pleb. 2. A vestige. 3. One whose
chief diversion lately has been to watch himself grow beautifully less.
4. A First Cause run to seed. 5. Divine Right tempered by bombs.
KINDERGARTEN: The greatest scheme ever devised--for the education of
parents.
KNOCKING: A slow but sure way of putting the skids under your prospects.
Push in the door softly, and all things are yours--knock and nothing
shall be opened unto you.
KNOWLEDGE: The distilled essence of our intuitions, corroborated by
experience. Knowledge is what I know; wisdom is what I see; theology is
what I guess.
LATER: The Utopia of Postponement; a marvelous door of gold at the end
of every perspective, to which Procrastination holds the keys. The
Concierge of tomorrow. (Some things are done sooner, others are done
now, but most things are done later; hence, manana, dreams and regrets.)
LAUGHTER: 1. The sound you always hear when you chase your hat down the
street. 2. Nature's rest-cure for tired nerves. 3. The solace of the
sad. 4. A facial sunburst that is fatal to the glooms.
LAW: 1. A scheme for protecting the parasite and prolonging the life of
the rogue, averting the natural consequences which would otherwise come
to them. 2. The crystallization of public opinion.
LAWYER: 1. A person who takes this from that, with the result that That
hath not where to lay his head. 2. An unnecessary evil. 3. The only man
in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
LEARN: To add to one's ignorance by extending the knowledge we have of
the things that we can never know.
LIE: The weapon of defense that kind Providence provides for the
protection of the oppressed.
LEVITATION: The creeping up of your trousers when you ride horseback, so
that they supply you a necktie.
LANGUAGE: The tool of the mind.
LIBELOUS: To be tactless in type.
LIAR: 1. One who tells the truth about something that never happened;
hence, a poet, a preacher, a politician, or an Arctic explorer. 2. An
expert witness on the side of the Prosecution, or any witness called by
the Defense. 3. One who reasons far ahead of his time; a seer. (As all
combinations of facts must occur in endless time, the liar, no matter
how absurd his statement, is uttering a truth, because he is stating a
fact that has occurred or will occur at some future date. Thus, a liar,
in the sense of one who utters a falsehood, can not be said, strictly
speaking, to exist. As dirt is merely nectar in the process of evolving,
so a liar is an observer born out of his time. He is the victim of a
divine prank.)
LITERATURE: The art of saying a thing by saying something else just as
good.