slogan of a party or sect that seeks to enslave some other party or
sect. 3. The lost latchkey to the Citadel of Power. 4. The sacred
aeroplane of King Ego. 5. The right to go forth unimpeded from any
place, and also to come back. 6. The Northwest Passage to Nowhere. 7.
The thing Patrick Henry asked for when the bartender asked him what he
would have. 8. Only a comparative term. 9. Responsibility--that is why
most men dread it.
LIBRARY: A place where the dead lie.
LOGIC: An instrument used for bolstering a prejudice.
LOAFER: The man who is usually busy keeping some one else from working.
LIFE: 1. An ante-mortem statement; the intrigue of force and matter; the
insomnia of death; a log-jam on the stream of life. 2. The pursuit of
the superfluous. 3. The cupola of a tomb. 4. A game something like Blind
Man's Buff. 5. The paradise of liars. 6. A compromise between Fate and
Freewill. 7. A warfare between the sexes. 8. What you choose to make it.
9. A bank-account with so much divine energy at your disposal. 10. Just
one improper number after another. 11. The interval between the time
your teeth are almost through and you are almost through with your
teeth. 12. An affirmative between two negatives.
LONELY: A peculiar feeling caused by the presence of one or more bores.
LOVERS: Unconscious comedians.
LOVE: The third rail for Life's Empire State Express. The beginning of
all wisdom, all sympathy, all compassion, all art, all religion.
LIVING: A mode of wasting time from the cradle to the grave consecrated
by immemorial usage.
LITIGATION: A form of hell whereby money is transferred from the pockets
of the proletariat to that of lawyers.
MANKIND: 1. A nomadic savage that has wandered over the face of the
earth from East to West in order to reach the East so it could go West
again. It has left many traces of its life--barrooms, brothels, jails,
churches, gallows, best sellers, etc. 2. In the animal kingdom, a
surreptitious and supposititious supererogation. 3. Among the Simians a
place equivalent to our hell. "Oh, you go to Mankind," is quite
frequently heard in the African jungle, even in the best society.
MAHIN: A jumbo of publicity who puts it over.
MENTAL DISSOLUTION: That condition where you are perfectly satisfied
with your religion, education and government.
MAN: 1. A super-simian. 2. Holy dicebox of the devil. 3. God's
scrapbook. 4. Anything allowed to stand at a public bar. 5. A biped with
feathers in his or her hat. 6. A being said to be the highest work of
God--and who admits it. 7. Any creature that creates a Creator in his
own image. 8. A god in the crib.
MAN-HATER: A woman who, finding herself no longer acceptable to man,
flirts with Mephisto.
MARRIAGE: 1. A legal or religious ceremony by which two persons of the
opposite sex solemnly agree to harass and spy on each other for
ninety-nine years, or until death do them join. 2. A way-station, not
the end of the journey. 3. The aspiration of two vowels to be a
diphthong. 4. Love's demitasse.
MAYOR: 1. _Particeps criminis._ 2. The head and front of our offending.
3. Polonius Pecksniff, who plays Bottom for a stipend. 4. A chaste,
honorable, virtuous person whose private life is made inviolable by the
libel laws. 5. A prickly sensation in the back of Folly and Revelry. 6.
The culmination, zenith, equator and pediment of self-sufficient
mediocrity. 7. A crow's-nest from which one may see the perpetually
receding horizons of the Governorship and the Presidency. 8. A chef of
morality. 9. Any person afflicted with primary, secondary or tertiary
holiness. 10. A palm-reader. 11. A nebulous cluster of thought-embryons
resolved into a gaseous state. 12. The nosebag of public decency. 13.
The _alter ego_ of organized cant. 14. The critic of impure reason. 15.
Lobster emeritus. 16. A person who takes an oath to love, honor and obey
Tartuffe.
MANHOLES: The apertures in a peekaboo shirtwaist.
MARTYR: Any man who is willing to sacrifice others for his "cause."
MASTER-MAN: A man who is master of one person--himself.
MASTERSHIP: Industry, concentration, self-confidence.
MATHEMATICS: A tentative agreement that two and two make four.
MATTEAWAN: The antechamber of liberty for a murder-gent.
MILITARISM: A fever for conquest, with Peace for a shield, using music
and brass buttons to dazzle and divert the Populace.
MERCY: 1. The charity of tyrants. 2. The forgiveness of one scoundrel by
another. 3. The culmination of the Will-to-Power and its final
apotheosis. 4. A quality which, like soup, the more it is strained the
less soup and the more water you have. 5. In war a universal mode of
subjugating a people.
MEPHISTO: The fourth person in the Holy Trinity.
MILITANCY: A fixed, fighting mental attitude that will never know when
the war is over.
MIDNIGHT: 1. The Pole of the hours; a pincushion on which sparkle all
the seconds of a day; the keel of the good ship Tomorrow. 2. A chimney
whence the dreams of today issue in smoke.
METAPHYSICS: 1. An attempt to define a thing and by so doing escape the
bother of understanding it. 2. The explanation of a thing by a person
who does not understand it.
MIDDLEMAN: One who works both ends against the middle.
MILLENNIUM: 1. A thousand years beginning with Now and ending with Then.
2. A mythical period when every one will pay his debts and begin
tomorrow again on renewed credit. 3. A religious cycle which has no
visible means of support, even admitting the ideality of time. Hence, by
extension and usage--[Here insert a Mergenthaler pi line of thirty-two
ems.]
MAMMON: The Pope of Protestantism.
MUCKRAKER: One who sits on the fence and defames American enterprise as
it marches by.
MIRACLE: 1. A happening seen by four men at once, but by no one man in
particular--hence, a collective, but otherwise untrue, fact. 2. The
minutiæ of cosmologies. 3. A physical event described by those to whom
it was related by men who did not see it. 4. A portent that precedes the
coming of a Liar with letters patent from Nowhere, or a series of
extraordinary occurrences that attend his comings and goings and
mouthings that in no way equal in majesty, beauty or mystery the
simplest commonplace of his life. (No god, demigod, or other parasite of
human ignorance is complete without miracles, for it is only the natural
and commonplace that are unbelievable.)
MOTHERHOOD: The headliner in God's great vaudeville.
MISSIONARIES: Sincere, self-deceived persons suffering from meddler's
itch.
MISTRESS: 1. A female who has rights, as distinguished from a married
woman, who has duties. 2. One whose respect and love some married men
may hold without the non-transferable license in the bottom of a trunk.
MARTYRDOM: The sweet apotheosis of the things we do not care to avoid.
MINUTE: 1. The crutch on which the Hour leans as it limps into Eternity.
2. A space of time in which we dream of something that will never come
true, or form a resolution that another minute effaces.
MODESTY: 1. A beau-catcher that young ladies wear and women affect. 2.
In a sweetmeat, the souffle through which we dig to reach the plums. 3.
The blush on the face of Desire at the consciousness of its own
immodesty. 4. Among men modesty is the will-to-wait and seize. 5. Venom,
who sidles into corners and shuns the limelight, so that he may the
better see. 6. The attitude of mind that precedes the pounce. 7. The
subtlest symptom of paranoia. 8. Egotism turned wrong side out.
MUMMY: 1. An unobjectionable party whose motives are not questioned. 2.
One who is not in business for his health. 3. Any one who does not
advertise.
MORALITY: 1. The formaldehyde of theology. 2. The line of conduct that
pays.
MORALIST: 1. A beautified eunuch. 2. One self-elected to make the stupid
more stupid. 3. Any one skilled in the science of pornography. 4. A
retired roue. 5. One of the Sacred Legion of Coprolitis.
MORGUE: The pantheon of the unremembered; Death's shop-window.
MUNSEY: 1. Any publisher who does much business on small mental capital.
2. _Verb_: To munsey--to print much and say nothing. 3. A literary
laxative. 4. To put up money for a monkey monarchy.
MURDERER: 1. A savior of society. Synonyms: Soldier, hangman, doctor. 2.
A man born ahead of or after his time.
MUSIC: 1. Anything that has charms to soothe a savage beast. 2.
Unnecessary noises heard in restaurants and cheap hotels. 3. The only
one of the arts that can not be prostituted to a base use. 4. An attempt
to express the emotions that are beyond speech. 5. A noise less
objectionable than any other noise.
MYSTIC: 1. One who guzzles his God. 2. A person who is puzzled before
the obvious, but who understands the non-existent. 3. To stand over the
vasty deep to summon monsters and slip in. 4. Sap that has lost its way.
5. A gymnast who turns flip-flops between the Here and the Not-Here.
(Plato was the first mystic. It was he who announced the discovery of
the Non-Existent. Hegel was the last mystic, for it was he who proved
the Non-Existent was and was not, might have been and never could be,
has was, is now, and never shall be.)
NATURE: 1. The Unseen Intelligence which loved us into being, and is
disposing of us by the same token. 2. That which every one but a
theologian understands, but which no one can define. 3. The Louvre of
the Esthetic Eye; the abattoir of the Religious Eye; the charivari of
the Ironic Eye. 4. The eternal Kishineff of an implacable God.
NANCY: A person of neither sex, who yet combines the bad qualities of
both.
NIGGER: A colored person who has no money.
NEW THOUGHT: Plain, simple commonsense.
NEWSPAPER OFFICE: A figment factory.
NIETZSCHE (FRIEDRICH): A thunder smith.
NEBULOUS TYPOTHETÆ: A bum printer who can never be found when wanted.
NEIGHBOR: The man who knows more about you than you know about yourself.
NOTHING: 1. A negative which is the reality behind every ghostly
affirmative. 2. Something that has density without weight, like a
barber's breath.
NOMINATION: 1. Paradigrammatics, or the art of molding figures in
plaster. 2. The call of the vile. 3. In democracies, the divine
sacrament administered to ignorance. 3. The election, divination and
apotheosis of a paramount parasite.
NEW YORK: The posthumous revenge of the Merchant of Venice.
NESBIT: A plenipotentiary of publicity who takes pretty nothings and
makes of them New York Central literary hash.
OBEDIENCE: 1. Expectation on a monument. 2. A dignified retreat from
Balaklava. 3. Lex Talionis playing 'possum. 4. The second law of Nature,
the first being murder. _E. g._, "After all, it was my brother's
Obedience to the Lord that laid the foundation of my glory."--From
Cain's _Diary of an Altar-Wrecker_.
OPPORTUNITY: 1. The only Knocker that is welcome. 2. Health and a job.
OBLIVION: 1. The memory of Eternity. 2. A place where the human race and
politicians are as one; where immortals are afflicted with aphasia;
where God enjoys a long siesta; where we lose the bores and all those
good folks who want to tell us the sad story of their lives.
OLD MAID: A lady of uncertain age and uneasy virtue.
OPERA: 1. Forerunner of the phonograph. 2. A rendezvous for the bored.
OPTIMISM: 1. The instinct to lie. 2. Fatty degeneration of intelligence.
3. A philosophical system that attempts to demonstrate the existence of
a pre-established Stupidity. 4. To believe that disease, dirt,
earthquakes, fires, wars, politicians, blindness, and burial alive,
celebrate and enhance the Glory of God. 5. To whistle while passing a
cemetery in the night; to sing a hymn while having a tooth pulled; to
smile while being robbed. 6. A tipple invented by Leigh Mitchell Hodges,
the basis of which is clams and prune juice. 7. A kind of heart
stimulant--the digitalis of failure.
ORTHODOXY: 1. In religion, that state of mind which congratulates itself
on being absolutely right, and a belief that all who think otherwise are
wholly wrong. 2. A faith in the fixed--a worship of the static. 3. The
joy that comes from thinking that most everybody is lined up for Limbus
with no return ticket. 4. A condition brought about by the sprites of
Humor, according to the rule that whom the gods would destroy they first
make mad. 5. The zenith of selfishness and the nadir of egotism. 6.
Mephisto with a lily in his hand. 7. A corpse that does not know it is
dead. 8. Spiritual constipation. 9. That peculiar condition where the
patient can neither eliminate an old idea or absorb a new one.
ORGANIZED RELIGION: Antique philosophy, or the rule of the priest.
OBSTINACY: 1. To stick to your favorite lie or truth because you know
you are wrong in either case. 2. The ego's peacock-plumes.
OPTIMIST: 1. A neurotic person with gooseflesh, and teeth a-chatter,
trying hard to be brave. 2. A man who when he falls in the soup thinks
of himself as being in the swim. 3. A man who does not care what
happens, so long as it doesn't happen to him.
ORATORY: 1. Chin-music with Prince Albert accompaniment. 2. The lullaby
of the Intellect. 3. Palaver in a Prince Albert.
ORIENT: 1. The subconscious part of the Occident. 2. The cradle of all
infamies and all wisdom. 3. A place where God and the house have an
esoteric meaning.
PAIN: 1. The sacred, immanent music of the Cosmos written in slow triple
time. 2. A form of salvation invented by Christianity. 3. A beautiful
and ecstatic state wherein one comes to a realization of the benevolence
of the Almighty.
PARADISE: 1. A place where one is permitted to continue one's vices,
excesses and inanities for an eternity. 2. A postmortem rake-off. 3. Any
place from which one can see a friend in Hell. 4. One good telephone
system. (Christians, Mohammedans and Billysundays have promised
themselves a cheerful time after death; this they call _Paradise_. The
Jews are the only people who have no Paradise beyond the tomb; this is
easily explained when it is remembered that they own New York.)
PARODY: A calico cat stuffed with cotton.
PARVENU: One who has risen suddenly from nothing and becomes nothing
suddenly.
PEACE: A monotonous interval between fights.
PEDANT: A person with more education than he can use.
PERFORMER: One who has a right to do troglodyte stunts and who can do
something else.
PERFUME: Any smell that is used to down a worse one.
PHILOSOPHY: Our highest conception of life, its duties and its
destinies.
POLITICIANS: 1. Men who volunteer the task of governing us for a
consideration. 2. See Graftheimer.
PERICLES: See Aspasia.
PESSIMIST: 1. One who has been intimately acquainted with an Optimist.
2. The official vinegar-taster to Setebos.
PIETY: 1. The tinfoil of pretense. 2. That feeling of reverence we have
toward the Almighty on account of His supposed resemblance to ourselves.
PUBLISHER: 1. An emunctory business, first functioned by Barabbas. 2.
One of a band of panders which sprang into existence soon after the
death of Gutenberg and which now overruns the world. 3. The patron saint
of the mediocre.
POET: 1. A person born with the instinct to poverty. 2. One whose ideas
of the beautiful and the sublime get him in jail or Potter's Field. 3.
The patron saint of landlords. 4. A worthless, shiftless chap whose
songs adorn the libraries of fat shopkeepers and paunchy Philistines one
hundred years after the chap has died of malnutrition. 5. A dope-fiend.
POETRY: 1. A substitute for the impossible. 2. The bill and coo of sex.
PLATONIC LOVE: The only kind that is blind. It never knows where it is
going to fetch up.
PLANET: A planet is a large body of matter entirely surrounded by a
void, as distinguished from a clergyman, who is a large void entirely
surrounded by matter.
PLAY: A wise method of Nature which prevents one's nerves from setting
on the outside of his Stein-Bloch.
POCKET: The seat of the human soul.
POLICE: Similia similibus.
POLICY: Leaving a few things unsaid.
POLITENESS: 1. The screen of language; the irony of civility; a
fishing-rod. 2. A substitute for war. 3. To wipe your feet carefully on
the common doormat before letting yourself in another's premises with a
skeleton key. 4. Caliban in a boiled shirt, tuxedo and spats.
(Politeness in the animal world is known after eating only; in the human
world it is known both before and after eating, and, in a certain
restricted circle, during eating.)
PRAYER: A supplication intended for the person who prays. Only very dull
people doubt its efficacy.
PRIG: A person with more money than he needs.
PREACHER: 1. Mendicancy in a celluloid collar. 2. A man who advises
others concerning things about which he knows nothing. 3. Any man who
lives on six hundred dollars a year and only works orally. 4. (Now
obsolete) One who makes pastoral calls, frightens the young, astonishes
the old, bothers the busy, and serves disappointed females as vicarious
lover, father, friend, and personal representative of Deity.
PRACTICAL POLITICS: The glad hand, and a swift kick in the pants.
PRINCIPLE: 1. Bait. 2. A formula for doing a thing that, unformulated,
would land the doer in jail. (Must not be confused with the word
_principal_. Both words are used correctly in the following sentence:
One may live one's life without principle, but not without principal.
Or, again, Principle is sometimes principal; but principal has no
principle. Or, The principal was never paid on principle.)
PROSECUTOR: 1. One who abets a crime after it has or has not been
committed. 2. An oratorical censor that precedes the coming of the
hangman. 3. A pumice-stone that gives to the Statue of Justice a
cleanly, Christian look. 4. A nose that can sniff the gallows, long
before the wood is cut for it in the forest.
POSTPONEMENT: The father of failure.
PRISON: 1. A place where any lady may have a baby without fearing
society. 2. An institution where even crooks go wrong. 3. The House of a
Thousand Tears. 4. The last resort of the obscure to achieve fame. 5. A
banker's mess-hall. 6. A place where men go to take the vow of chastity,
poverty and obedience. 7. An example of a Socialist's Paradise, where
equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is
eliminated.
PROTESTANTISM: 1. A splinter from the cross of Christ. 2. Acrobatic
theologic mugwumpery. 3. Any one of fifty-seven varieties of hate. 4.
Sects which have taken the petticoats off of the saints and put them on
their pastors.
PROGRESS: Getting free from theology, and substituting psychology
instead.
PROGRESSIVE: 1. A politician who wears his opinions pompadour. 2. An
obstructionist who grows fat on conservatism and conversation. 3. A
reactionary to whom movement and motion are necessary in order to keep
warm, and secure gulps and guzzles. 4. A hungry or unsuccessful person;
hence, an explosive, quixotic fellow with empty pockets and a shallow
pate. 5. One who has felt the slings and arrows of outrageous success
that has come to others. 6. A political piker, who will not play the
game according to the rules which he himself devised. 7. One who would
recall all decisions that do not uphold his claims. 8. A man who steals
a label, and clapping it on himself, thinks that he is It. 9. A plan for
going forward by backing up to mob rule. (The first Progressive of whom
we know was Judas. The next was Ananias. Lazarus was a Progressive, and
had he married the Queen of Sheba he would have changed places with
Dives. _E. g._, "This age belongs to the Progressives."--From Kazook's
_Confessions of a Popular Lick-Spittle_.)
PURGATORY: Two telephone systems in one town.
PROSPERITY: 1. That peculiar condition which excites the lively interest
of the ambulance-chaser. 2. That which comes about when men believe in
other men. 3. That condition which attracts the lively interest of
lawyers, and warrants your being sued for damages or indicted, or both.
POLYGAMY: An endeavor to get more out of life than there is in it.
PSYCHOLOGY: The science of human minds and their relationship one to
another.
PUBLIC OPINION: The judgment of the incapable many opposed to that of
the discerning few.
PUNISHMENT: 1. The justice that the guilty deal out to those who are
caught. 2. A perpetual fine, imposed hourly during the lifetime of a
human being for his temerity in living, and continued in Heaven or Hell
for his temerity in dying. 3. Among the poor and lowly, a service due
the State for disobeying the mandates of the rich and powerful; among
the rich, a slight reaction from overeating. (There are three kinds of
punishment: the punishment of God, the punishment of man, and the
punishment of living in Buffalo.)
POPULARITY: The triumph of the commonplace.
PROPHETS: The advance couriers of Time.
PURITY: 1. A rapt, interested and ecstatic aloofness toward natural
processes. 2. A sewerage system that carries off everything, leaving the
soul perfectly bald. 3. A condition of the mind that causes one to snoop
around in garbage-dumps and start a league. 4. A plan of teaching things
to children in which they are not interested. 5. An ethereal nose giving
the miraculous power of sensing the lavatory in the Elysian Fields
before it smells the flowers. (There is purity of mind, purity of body
and purity of speech. Any one person endowed with all three of these
modes or purity is blessed, elect, saved, or otherwise atrophied and
pickled.)
PHARISEE: A man with more religion than he knows what to do with.
PHILISTINE: A term of reproach used by prigs to designate certain people
they do not like.
PHILOSOPHER: One who thinks in order to believe; one who formulates his
prejudices and systematizes his ignorance.
ROYCROFT: 1. _Roy_ means "king"; and _croft_ means "home or craft."
Thus, Roycroft means King-Craft; working for the highest; doing your
work just as good as you can--making things for the King. 2. The dignity
and the divinity of labor--peace, reciprocity, health, industry,
persistency and endurance.
RELAXATION: The first requirement of strength.
RECIPROCITY: 1. The act of seconding the emotion. 2. A widow teaching a
clergyman how to tango, in return for his kindness in having shown her
how to swim.
RACE PROBLEM: Picking the winner.
RECIPE: 1. Work, smile, study, play, love--Mix. 2. Concentrate,
Consecrate, Work.
REDEEMER: 1. A man who died that grafters might live. 2. An Oriental who
would have forgiven Hiram Johnson. 3. The founder of a great trust, with
headquarters in the Vatican. 4. Any one who consorts with the
underworld, but who spends his vacation after death in the upper world.
5. In the Catholic Church the Man Higher Up, to whom the Pope plays Jack
Rose. 6. One who saved the whole world, but who had himself damned for
his pains. _E. g._, First Citizen: "Christ was a myth." Second Citizen:
"He was not!" (Then they murder each other in His Name.)
REASON: The arithmetic of the emotions.
RELIGION: Philosophy touched with emotion.
RAILROADS: The most important factor for progress and enlightenment in
the world today.
RENUNCIATION: The act of giving up your seat in a street-car to a pretty
woman, and then purposely stepping on an old man's toes.
REFORMER: 1. One who causes the rich to band themselves against the
poor. 2. One who educates the people to appreciate the things they need.
REGION: A specific, definite space, as distinguished from any other
specific, definite space; as, East Aurora, Barren Island, Kalamazoo, Sea
Grit, Beverly.
REPARTEE: Any remark which is so clever that it makes the listener wish
he had said it himself.
RESIGNATION: 1. A truce with ourselves in order to give us time to bury
our living. 2. Pride walling itself up. 3. To keep shop without a
show-window. 4. To go to sleep in the lap of the inevitable. 5. A
covered walk to the interior of ourselves; a subway to some other form
of trespass; a peephole into the enemy's fortress. 6. To play possum
when one hears the footfall of Fate on the stairs.
REPUTATION: A bubble which a man bursts when he tries to blow it for
himself.
RESURRECTION: The hypothetical New-Year's Day in the calendar of the
dead.
REMORSE: That feeling which we all have when the thing fails to work,
and the world knows it. The form that failure takes when it has made a
grab and got nothing.
RESPECTABILITY: The dickey on the bosom of civilization.
ROMANCE: Where the hero begins by deceiving himself and ends by
deceiving others.
RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION: 1. Hate that scorches like hell, but which the
possessor thinks proves he is right. 2. Your own wrath as opposed to the
shocking bad temper of others.
RIGHTEOUSNESS: 1. Only a form of commonsense. 2. Wise expediency.
REVIVAL: Religion with a vaudeville attachment.