RUINS: 1. The hope of the ancient yesterday. 2. Absolute proof that the
world of dreams, like the planet earth, is round. (Ruins are chiefly
notable for the number of enlightened liars, called archeologists, they
produce.)
SACRILEGE: 1. Any impolite act in the presence of a Humbug. 2. To shock
the sensibilities of a Nobody. 3. To kill a mystical Mule or swap jokes
in public with a Ghost.
SACRED SOIL: That which is well tilled.
SAINT: 1. Generally speaking, a person who retires into the wilderness
of the spirit in order to coddle a ruling weakness. 2. To become polite
toward God and His universe. 3. A steeplejack on miraged minarets.
SAINTSHIP: The exclusive possession of those who have either worn out or
never had the capacity to sin.
SANITY: The ability to do team-work.
SALOON: The poor man's club; run with intent to make the poor man
poorer.
SAVAGES: Men who like to go to war.
SANATORIUM: The place where a man is sent who has money, as opposed to
"Bughouse," meaning the place where a man is sent who has no
bank-balance.
SATIRIST: 1. A taxidermist of the Past, Present and Future; one who
disembowels, stuffs and mounts all the gods, living and dead; one who
fills up with straw and sawdust all illusions. 2. An esoteric mimic. 3.
A being with an eye in the back of his head. 4. A postlude to the day's
funeral march; a prelude to freedom.
SCANDAL: Gossip related by a small-bore.
SALVATION: Redemption from a belief in miracles.
SCHOLAR: 1. An ornate fossil. 2. A deadly ptomain that infests all forms
of dynamic thought. 3. An impenetrable mass of matter that contains
within itself the principle of unchangeability. 4. A turtle on whose
shell is carved certain hieroglyphic lettering; such as, Ph. D., M. D.,
LL. D. 5. A medieval owl that roosts in universities, especially those
that are endowed. 6. A plaster-of-Paris convolute. 7. A man, long on
advice but short on action, who thinks he thinks. 8. One who draws his
breath and salary. 9. Anybody with a bulging brow and no visible means
of support.
SELF-RELIANCE: The name we give to the egotism of the man who succeeds.
SCHOOL: A training-place--mental, physical, moral. Good boys are boys at
work. Bad boys are good boys who misdirect their energies.
SCIENCE: 1. The knowledge of the common people classified and carried
one step further. 2. Accurate organized knowledge founded on fact. 3.
Classified superstition.
SECRET: 1. A thing we give to others to keep for us. 2. Something known
only to a few.
SEER: The scout of civilization.
SELF-CONTROL: The ability to restrain a laugh at the wrong place.
SILENCE: A trick of the human gullet that conceals weakness or
emptiness.
SHEENY: A Jew who has more money than you have.
SHOAL: Shallow, literary, theological. (By extension, Columbia, Harvard,
Yale and some other universities are sometimes called shoal-marks.)
SINCERITY: 1. A mental attitude acquired after long practise by man, in
order to conceal his ulterior motives. 2. To be childish, to be senile.
3. To lack invention, imagination or character. (A sincere man is one
who bluffs only a part of the time.)
SIN: Perverted power. The man without capacity for sin has no ability to
do good--isn't that so? His soul is a Dead Sea that supports neither
ameba nor fish, neither noxious bacilli nor useful life.
SERVILITY: 1. The instinct of superiority in its lowest form. 2. The
politician's virtue. 3. A means of getting on. 4. A natural law, the
violation of which makes one famous and poor.
SHERMAN ACT: A scheme to entrap men who set large numbers of people to
work at employment profitable to everybody concerned.
SOBER: 1. To be bored, unhappy, "all in." 2. To be born or live in
Philadelphia. 3. To be without money, to be destitute. 4. To die. _E.
g._, "Thank God, I am sober at last!" Dying words of Potodorus in _Two
Gentlemen of Yonkers_.
SCOTCH: A verb meaning with care.
SELF-PROTECTION: The first law of life.
SOCIALIST: 1. A person easily peeved. 2. In economics, a school of
thought founded by Cain. 3. A man who, so far as he himself is
concerned, considers a thing done when he has suggested it.
SMACK: A crude, rude, vulgar and unsatisfactory substitute for a kiss.
SOCIETY: 1. An erotic clique that reads _Vogue_, _Smart Set_ and _Town
Topics_. 2. A congregation of people who are not persons. 3. A vast
interchange of service through labor, ideas and commodities. 4. A relish
for solitude.
SOCIALISM: 1. A sincere, sentimental, beneficent theory, which has but
one objection, and that is, it will not work. 2. A plan by which the
inefficient, irresponsible, ineffective, unemployable and unworthy will
thrive without industry, persistence or economy. 3. An earnest effort to
get Nature to change the rules for the benefit of those who are tired of
the Game. 4. A social and economic scheme of government by which man
shall loiter rather than labor. 5. A survival of the unfit. 6. A device
for swimming without going near the _H_{2}O._. 7. Participation in
profits without responsibility as to deficits. 8. An arrangement for
destroying initiative, invention, creation and originality. 9.
Resolutions passed by a committee as a substitute for work. 10. A
sentiment which encouraged and evolved would lead to revolution, with
dynamiting and destruction as a prominent and recognized part of its
propaganda. 11. A system for turning water into wine, kerosene into
oyster-soup, and boulders into bread, by passing resolutions.
SOCIOLOGY: The religious application of economics.
SORROW: The magical palette upon which Life mixes her colors.
SLAVE: A person with a servile mind, who quickly crooks the pregnant
hinges of the knee, that thrift may follow fawning; who gratifies his
wants either through cringing flattery or coercion, and who tyrannizes
over others whenever he has a chance.
SPECIALIST: 1. One who limits himself to his chosen mode of ignorance,
and gets further into a bog than the man ahead of him. 2. A kind of
hypnotic trance wherein a person by centering his gaze on a given object
renders the object smaller in proportion as his illusion grows.
SOREHEAD: A politician who has reached for something that was not his,
and missed.
SOLITUDE: The only thing that can hold the balance true.
SORCERER: 1. Any one who can make the people of the United States
believe they rule. 2. A juggler (hence the founder of any religious,
political or philosophical system).
SPECIOUS: That form of argument used as an indoor sport by East Aurora
natives in an attempt to prove that two or three make four.
SORCERY: The art of charming money out of the pockets of those who do
not desire to part with it.
SPINSTERHOOD: An achievement, not a disgrace.
STALL STUFF: 1. Things said to see what the other person will say. 2.
The language used by politicians. 3. All conversation between spoons.
_Example_: Seeing Mr. Jones leave his office, you enter and ask his
stenographer this question: "Is Mr. Jones in?" (See Piffle, Pink Tea,
Four o'Clock.)
STAR: 1. A milestone in the Infinite. 2. A malicious, ironic eye. 3. A
device to show man his insignificance.
STARVATION: 1. The originator of thought. 2. A way to salvation. 3. A
physical eccentricity of the stomach. 4. A cure for indigestion. 5. A
banting process invented by Lazarus.
SPECIALIZATION: The ability to focus all your energies on one thing.
STUDIO: 1. A place where a model is borne to blush unseen, and contract
pneumonia in the chilly air. 2. A rendezvous of would-bes, has-beens and
never-wazzers. 3. A place to study the esoteric. 4. The most polite term
you can apply to it.
STUPIDITY: 1. The Utopia of the wise, the Lethe forbidden to the lips of
genius. 2. The driving power of a Mass in motion. 3. An incurable state
of somnambulism with which mankind is blessed, and under the spell of
which it performs the most fantastic actions, such as marriage,
balloting, warring, preaching, selling, buying, baptizing. 4. The
_leit-motif_ of the Vaudeville called Progressiveness.
SUPERSTITION: 1. Scrambled science flavored with fear. 2. Ossified
metaphor.
SURGERY: An adjunct, more or less valuable to the diagnostician.
STYLE: 1. The brogue of the mind. 2. A certain manner or deportment
which emanates from those who have neither manner nor deportment. 3. A
peculiar and individual manner of doing the unnecessary.
SUBSIDIARY: A competitor who has come off his perch through threats or
bribes, or both.
SUCCESS: 1. A sunset by Turner. 2. A stained-glass window through which
one may see an ironic moon. 3. The final link in a chain of chalk. 4. To
rise from the illusion of pursuit to the disillusion of possession. 5.
An inability to further fletcherize. 6. Giving up the fight, being
possessed of the fallacy that you have won. 7. Death's lullaby. 8. The
accomplishment of one's best. 9. To write your name high upon the
outhouse of a country tavern. 10. A constant sense of discontent, broken
by brief periods of satisfaction on doing some specially good piece of
work. 11. A matter of outliving your sins. 12. A subtle connivance of
Nature for bringing about a man's defeat. 13. The realization of the
estimate which you place upon yourself. 14. Voltage under
control--keeping one hand on the transformer of your Kosmic Kilowatts.
15. A matter of the red corpuscle. 16. The thing that spoils many a good
failure. 17. Something that is hideous to all but its victims.
SUCTION: An automatic, murderous and perpetual movement of Society
against each individual.
SUPERNATURAL: The natural not yet understood.
SUN: 1. A giant spot-light, which from the wings of space plays
intermittently upon a meaningless ten-twenty-thirty vaudeville show. 2.
The root of all evil, the mother of all beauty, and the final tomb of
all that is good, bad or indifferent. 3. A dyehouse, probably the first.
(The sun was once worshiped as a divinity, but later the competition
between gods and divinities became so strenuous that the sun was
forgotten, hence his casual earthquakes, floods and other little
reminders that we and our gods are only his gimcracks.)
STATUTE: The proof, record and final justification of the infallibility
of Ignorance.
STRONG MAN: One who busies himself with the useful tasks that others can
not, or will not do, and allows those who can do nothing else to do the
easy things.
SYMPATHY: 1. A malady that sometimes afflicts the rich. 2. The lees of
the wine-cup offered to another. 3. An impulse toward ourselves through
the heart of another. 4. Whatever may be extended to another that does
not take the shape of money. 5. The sum of all virtues. 6. The first
attribute of love as well as its last. (I am not sure but that sympathy
is love's own self, vitalized mayhap by some divine actinic ray. Only
the souls who have suffered are well loved.)
TEACHER: 1. A person, either male or female, who instils into the head
of another person, either voluntarily or for pay, the sum and substance
of his or her ignorance. 2. One who makes two ideas grow where only one
grew before.
TALK: To open and close the mouth rapidly while the bellows in the
throat pumps out the gas in the brain.
TAFTIAN: Any man who is too cowardly to fight, and too fat to run.
TEMPTATION: A desire to do something you know you should not do.
THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY: A place where young men are taught to silence the
questions of the ignorant.
TEMPLE: A place other than a bed, where one takes one's shoes off.
(There are Jewish temples, pagan temples and money temples, but no
Christian temples: the latter has no need of them, because Christian
religion is the only one in the world in which its believers and
followers practise exactly what its Founder taught. Each Christian may
point to himself and say proudly, "Ecce Temple," hence, etc., etc.,
etc.)
THE PHILISTINE: A publication that puts the Syracuse Product on the
terminal feathers of the Idea Bird.
THE-SCENE-CHANGES: A device invented by a writer who was running short
of Cosmic Gasoline.
TOMORROW: The mother of regret.
THANKSGIVING: 1. A mass said for the repose of the living. 2. Gratitude
in the presence of the death of some one else. 3. The irony of fatality.
4. The instinctive and perpetual atavism of the Will-to-Live.
(Thanksgiving-Day in the United States is a national holiday on which
all the people who during the past year have survived earthquake, fire,
housemaid's knee and death, overeat and thus thank God for His
favoritism.)
TIGHTWADITY: A disease in which one dollar obstructs the vision to the
exclusion of a higher denomination.
TOLERANCE: An agreement to tolerate intolerance.
TODAY: The hearse that carries the dreams of yesterday to the cemetery.
THE: An article, aristocratic by birth and breeding, but which
degenerates into an adjective in the sentence, "He is THE man of the
hour."
THEOLOGY: 1. A hideous juggernaut to whose wheels cling the blood and
bone and the flattened flesh of a million dead emotions. 2. Not what we
know about God, but what we do not know about Nature. 3. Obsolete
psychology, or the arbitrary rule of a Theos or god. 4. An engine
planned for the purpose of bewildering humanity. 5. Self-deceived
egotism, hiding behind the name of Deity. 6. Antique and obsolete
philosophy. 7. The science of a non-existent, all-powerful, all-wise and
all-loving nix.
THINKER: 1. One who destroys philosophies. 2. One who can make others
think.
THOUGHT: 1. Something made up of the thoughts you, yourself, think. The
other kind is supplied to you by jobbers. 2. Mental dynamite.
TIME: 1. The press-agent of genius. 2. An eternal guest that banquets on
our ideals and bodies. 3. In the theater of the gods a moving-picture
film that reproduces the cosmic comedy. 4. A metaphysical entity that
made the Ingersoll watch a physical possibility. 5. A loafer playing at
tenpins. 6. An illusion--to orators. 7. The solvent and the dissolver of
all. (Time was anciently symbolized by Kronos; today it is symbolized by
the mystical syllables, So-Much-Per. The word has also undergone strange
etymological changes. Anciently, time was singular, but since the advent
of the Unions, we have "time and a third," "double time," etc.)
TOMB: A place for the deposit of the dead. (See College, Newspaper
Office, Philadelphia Club, Legation, etc.)
TOP-NOTCHER: An individual who works only for the interest of the
institution of which he is a part, not against it.
TOTAL DEPRAVITY: The greatest idea for the acquisition of power and pelf
ever devised.
TROUBLE: 1. A hallucination that affords a sweet satisfaction to the
possessor. 2. Any interesting topic of conversation. 3. A plan of Nature
whereby a person is diverted from the humiliation of seeing himself as
others see him. (An impressario's troubles begin when the prima donna
kicks and the ladies of the ballet won't.)
TRUMPET: A musical instrument which in the mouth of Gabriel will bring
to life for their eternal undoing all Shylocks, officeholders, editorial
writers, landlords, and professional epigrammatists.
TITLE: 1. A Pantheon of royal ciphers. 2. Anything superimposed on a
superfluity.
TRUTH: 1. A universal error. 2. A relation between one illusion (the
outer world) and another (the inner world). 3. A prejudice raised to an
axiom. 4. Something that a few will die for. 5. That which serves us
best in expressing our lives. (A rotting log is truth to a bed of
violets; while sand is truth to a cactus.) 6. Anything which happened,
might have happened, or which will possibly happen. 7. The opinion that
still survives. 8. An imaginary line dividing error into two parts.
TRADITION: 1. Salvation through ossification; redemption through
folklore; a fetter for the foolish. 2. A clock that tells what time it
was. 3. A method of holding the many back while some man does the thing
which they declare is impossible.
UNIVERSITY: 1. An institution for the prevention of learning. 2. A place
where rich men send their sons who have no aptitude for business. 3. A
plan for the elimination of physical culture and the exaltation of
athletics. 4. A literary, gonococci culture-bed. 5. A collection of
buildings which emit the odor of the classics and omit the odor of
sanctity. 6. A place wherein the youthful mind is taught the danger of
thinking.
UNION LABOR: A force which unchecked would develop into violent and
destructive anarchy.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Miss District de Columbia and her forty-eight
Subsidiaries.
UNREQUITED: (Used generally with the word love.) Inability to make both
ends meet.
UTOPIAN: A person who demands that you shall live up to his ideals.
UNPARDONABLE SIN: Neglecting to close the screen-door.
UP TO DATE: To be far behind the Ancients, who were generally ahead of
the current date. _E. g._, "This thing would never have happened if I
had only been up to date, but I tried to be dateless."--Last words of
Socrates.
UTOPIA: A place where you have but to suggest a thing, to consider it
done; a condition where all things are supplied on slipping a wish into
a slot.
USAGE: The consecration in time of something that was originally
absurd.
VICIOUS: 1. To be natural. 2. To give up lying. (A word taken from the
Zynrxi, and first used by the French at the Siege of Paris to describe
the Germans; hence, any one who does anything impolite or acts in any
way strictly in accordance with his innate tastes.)
VENOM: 1. The juice of hate. 2. The sap of reformers, moralists and
socialists. 3. The deadly smile of the optimist when he looks at the
under dog. 4. The physical sweat of a defeated candidate and the
emotional sweat of old maids. (Venom, like everything else, is subject
to the law of evolution and variation. Between the venom of Cain and the
venom of Tolstoy, several million instances could be quoted to prove the
universality and beneficence of this breedy instinct.)
VICTORY: A matter of staying-power.
VACILLATION: The prominent feature of weakness of character.
VAUDEVILLE: A matter of verve, nerve and vermilion.
VERACITY: The appendix vermiformis of the human character; a quaint
atavistic instinct. (Veracity was once quite common in the childhood of
the race; but as herding became more and more complex and human
relations became more and more interjangled, there came into being a
species of bipeds known as doctors, lawyers, politicians, editorial
writers and preachers. Coeval with their birth the instinct to veracity
weakened perceptibly until it reached the condition of nixus nihilus ni
in which we hold it today.)
VACATION: A period of increased and pleasurable activity when your wife
is at the seashore.
VIVISECTION: Blood-lust, screened behind the sacred name of Science.
VILE: 1. Anything that serves; whatever is useful. 2. Something done or
thought by some one else.
VINDICATION: The subtlest form of irony.
WADSWORTH: 1. A fabled people, whose remains are found in the Genesee
Valley, who chased an anise-seed bag around the steamheat and pretended
to be bored by existence. 2. Any one with more buzz-fuzz than brains.
WARRIOR: 1. A soldier de luxe. 2. A successful, patriotic thug who has
been dead fifty years or more. 3. A fearless person who gains renown by
the number of alcoholic drinks he has taken in a day and by the variety
and virulence of the venereal diseases he has contracted. 4. A myth, a
fable, a lie.
WAVES: The thoughts of the sea, which, like human wave-thoughts, roll
on, roll back, roll up and spray the void.
WEALTH: A cunning device of Fate whereby men are made captive, and
burdened with responsibilities from which only Death can file their
fetters.
WIFE: 1. In good society, a publicity agent who advertises her husband's
financial status through conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure. 2.
In the submerged tenth, a punching-bag and something handy for batting
up flies. 3. A man's mental mate, and therefore his competitor in the
race for power. 4. The other half of the sphere. (This view is usually
regarded as a vagary, and any one holding it is apt to be pointed out as
strange, peculiar, erratic and unsafe.)
WINE: An infallible antidote to commonsense and seriousness; an excuse
for deeds otherwise unforgivable.
WISDOM: A term Pride uses when talking of Necessity.
WISE MAN: One who sees the storm coming before the clouds appear.
WIT: The thing that fractures many a friendship.
WOMAN: 1. The First Cause. 2. A being created for the purpose of voting.
3. Any one with an allowance that is occasionally paid, but which can't
be collected. 4. A pet, a plaything, a scullion, a thing to die for, or
a thing to kill. 5. A being to get rid of or to secure--to run away
from, or with, as the case may be. 6. Among the Ancients, a slave, a
chattel; among the Moderns, a financial swashbuckler. Synonyms: sphinx,
devil, angel, liar, spendthrift.
WAR: The sure result of the existence of armed men.
WE: The smear of life against the radiant _x_.
WHISKY: The Devil's right bower.
WORDS: The airy, fairy humming-birds of the imagination.
WORDSWORTH (WILLIAM): The only Lilliputian that slipped under the canvas
into Olympus.
WORK: 1. That which keeps us out of trouble. 2. A plan of God to
circumvent the Devil.
WORMS: 1. The final word in criticism. 2. At the last analysis.
WORRY: Ironic nurse to old bedridden Dame Care. _E. g._, "I should
worry"--famous saying of the Infinite Nix at twelve o'clock Saturday
night of the Sixth Day as he threw down his tools and sent the Earth
about its business.
YESTERDAY: 1. One evil less and one memory more. 2. A short-change
artist, from whom we can never recover. 3. A period of time that has
always existed, in contradistinction to a period of time called tomorrow
that can never exist. 4. A mirror wherein if we look long enough we will
see ourselves as others could never possibly see us. 5. The Eden of the
sentimental. (Time is divided into yesterday, today and tomorrow, which
are but three varieties of the same metaphysical tetter. In the
beginning was the Infinite, and the Infinite begat Time, and Time begat
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.)
YOUR DUTY: The things you have to do, and not a damn tap more. The other
man's duty is the thing you think he should do.
YOURS: Anything which up to the present time the bunch has not been able
to get away from you.
ZODIAC: 1. The wallpaper of the heavens. 2. The mirrors of the
nothingness of Man and the sublimity of the nothingness of Space.
ZEAL: The feeling you have before you secure the thing, as compared with
"Stung," which is your condition after you have captured it.
ZONE: The region immediately surrounding a Limburger Cheese.
ZERO: A round figure often referred to by Doctor Cook in his diary, and
which his enemies tried to make symbolic of himself.
ZIGZAG: The route followed by poets in arriving at truth, as opposed to
the direct course which they take for the buffet.
ZEUS: A grouchy old god who was so reduced in estate that he posed as a
model for Greek artists.
ZEPHYR: A ladylike blizzard.
ZEITGEIST: The things that everybody believes, but that nobody
understands.
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics indicated _like this_
Small caps indicated LIKE THIS.
Each word definition was surrounded by small bullet shaped decorations.
Each letter group definition list and each page was surrounded by
page-width decorations.
The definitions are not in alphabetical order in the original.
Corrections made to text:
Definition of agriculturist: duplicate "in" removed.
Definition of chums: right parenthesis supplied at end of second
sentence.
Definition of consciousness: extraneous right parenthesis removed.
Definition of decalogue: "animiles" corrected to "animals".
Definition of diplomat: "man" corrected to "woman".
Definition of house: comma at end of sentence two changed to period.
Definition of oratory: 4 changed to 3.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Roycroft Dictionary, by Elbert Hubbard