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The Devil's Dictionary of Random Definitions |
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MARRIAGE, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
HABEAS CORPUS. A writ by which a man may be taken out of jail when confined for the wrong crime.
FUNERAL, n. A pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that deepens our groans and doubles our tears.
INCOME, n. The natural and rational gauge and measure of respectability,
the commonly accepted standards being artificial, arbitrary and fallacious.
LITIGATION, n. A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
OVERWORK, n. A dangerous disorder affecting high public functionaries who want to go fishing.
REASON, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire.
ELOQUENCE, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.
SELF-ESTEEM, n. An erroneous appraisement.
DISOBEY, v.t. To celebrate with an appropriate ceremony the maturity of a command.
ZEAL, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.
PROSPECT, n. An outlook, usually forbidding. An expectation, usually forbidden.
EDIBLE, adj. Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
INSURANCE, n. An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.
QUEEN, n. A woman by whom the realm is ruled when there is a king, and through whom it is ruled when there is not.
PRESIDENCY, n. The greased pig in the field game of American politics.
FOOL, n. A person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscience, omnipotent. He created patriotism and taught the nations war -- founded theology, philosophy, law, medicine and Chicago. He is from everlasting to everlasting -- such as creation's dawn beheld he fooleth now. And after the rest of us shall have retired for the night of eternal oblivion he will sit up to write a history of human civilization.
MAMMALIA, n.pl. A family of vertebrate animals whose females in a state of nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightened put them out to nurse, or use the bottle.
MISDEMEANOR, n. An infraction of the law having less dignity than a felony and constituting no claim to admittance into the best criminal society.
HUMORIST, n. A plague that would have softened down the hoar austerity of Pharaoh's heart and persuaded him to dismiss Israel with his best wishes, cat-quick.
MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
BRIDE, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
CORONATION, n. The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite bomb.
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
BRUTE, n. See HUSBAND.
 Ebony_Tear · Tue Nov 02, 2004 @ 03:07am · 0 Comments |
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