Chapter II: Part 2

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.

ROOSEVELT (THEODORE): A harangue-outang.

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

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