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Preface:
The Devil's Dictionary was begun in a weekly paper in 1881, and was continued in a desultory way and at long intervals until 1906. In that year a large part of it was published in covers with the title The Cynic's Word Book, a name which the author had not the power to reject nor the happiness to approve. To quote the publishers of the present work: "This more reverent title had previously been forced upon him by the religious scruples of the last newspaper in which a part of the work had appeared, with the natural consequence that when it came out in covers the country already had been flooded by its imitators with a score of 'cynic' books—The Cynic's This, The Cynic's That and The Cynic's t'Other. Most of these books were merely stupid, though some of them added the distinction of silliness. Among them, they brought the word 'cynic' into disfavor so deep that any book bearing it was discredited in advance of publication."
Meantime, too, some of the enterprising humorists of the country had helped themselves to such parts of the work as served their needs, and many of its definitions, anecdotes, phrases and so forth, had become more or less current in popular speech. This explanation is made, not with any pride of priority in trifles, but in simple denial of possible charges of plagiarism, which is no trifle. In merely resuming his own the author hopes to be held guiltless by those to whom the work is addressed—enlightened souls who prefer dry wines to sweet, sense to sentiment, wit to humor and clean English to slang.
A conspicuous, and it is hoped not unpleasant, feature of the book is its abundant illustrative quotations from eminent poets, chief of whom is that learned and ingenious cleric, Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J., whose lines bear his initials. To Father Jape's kindly encouragement and assistance the author of the prose text is greatly indebted.
A.B.
Don't Panic:
As a candid reference, The Devil's Dictionary is often not safe for work (NSFW).
More from Mike Leung:
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for screen & tablet
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"I was in the drawing-room, enjoying my dinner," said Brillat-Savarin, beginning an anecdote. "What!" interrupted Rochebriant; "eating dinner in a drawing-room?" "I must beg you to observe, monsieur," explained the great gastronome, "that I did not say I was eating my dinner, but enjoying it. I had dined an hour before."
A lady with one of her ears applied
To an open keyhole heard, inside,
Two female gossips in converse free—
The subject engaging them was she.
"I think," said one, "and my husband thinks
That she's a prying, inquisitive minx!"
As soon as no more of it she could hear
The lady, indignant, removed her ear.
"I will not stay," she said, with a pout,
"To hear my character lied about!"
—Gopete Sherany
O, the Lord of Law on the Throne of Thought,
A gilded impostor is he.
Of shreds and patches his robes are wrought,
His crown is brass,
Himself an ass,
And his power is fiddle-dee-dee.
Prankily, crankily prating of naught,
Silly old quilly old Monarch of Thought.
Public opinion's camp-follower he,
Thundering, blundering, plundering free.
Affected,
Ungracious,
Suspected,
Mendacious,
Respected contemporaree!
—J.H. Bumbleshook
Megaceph, chosen to serve the State
In the halls of legislative debate,
One day with all his credentials came
To the capitol's door and announced his name.
The doorkeeper looked, with a comical twist
Of the face, at the eminent egotist,
And said: "Go away, for we settle here
All manner of questions, knotty and queer,
And we cannot have, when the speaker demands
To be told how every member stands,
A man who to all things under the sky
Assents by eternally voting 'I'."
"Monsieur Franqulin, inventor of electricity. This illustrious savant, after having made several voyages around the world, died on the Sandwich Islands and was devoured by savages, of whom not a single fragment was ever recovered."
Electricity seems destined to play a most important part in the arts and industries. The question of its economical application to some purposes is still unsettled, but experiment has already proved that it will propel a street car better than a gas jet and give more light than a horse.
The cur foretells the knell of parting day;
The loafing herd winds slowly o'er the lea;
The wise man homeward plods; I only stay
To fiddle-faddle in a minor key.
- 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.
- A method of convincing fools. The art is commonly presented under the visible aspect of a bald-headed little man gesticulating above a glass of water.
- An imaginary delightful country which the ancients foolishly believed to be inhabited by the spirits of the good. This ridiculous and mischievous fable was swept off the face of the earth by the early Christians—may their souls be happy in Heaven!
- The Heaven of the ancients.Nothing could be more ludicrous than this crude conception; instead of golden clouds, harps, crowns and a great white throne, there were fields, groves, streams, flowers and temples. In the ancient Elysium we have a signal example of the inferiority of pagan imagination to Christian knowledge.
He was a slave: at word he went and came;
His iron collar cut him to the bone.
Then Liberty erased his owner's name,
Tightened the rivets and inscribed his own.
—G.J.
- To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbor's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his glutæus maximus.
- To cure the human bacon. The processes of embalming have been essentially the same in all ages and countries. The following recipe from an ancient papyrus, discovered in the pocket of a mummy in a museum, gives a good general notion of the business:Remove the decedent's refractory tripes
And glut him with various kinds of swipes
Till the pickle pervades all his tissues and drips
In a delicate odorous dew from the tips
Of his fingers and toes. Then carefully stitch
In a league of linen bedaubed with pitch.
Sign him and seal him and pot him away
To await the dawn of the Judgment Day,
A source—as he tranquilly presses his shelf—
Of joy to his widow and pride to himself.
The man was perishing apace
Who played the tambourine:
The seal of death was on his face—
'Twas pallid, for 'twas clean."This is the end," the sick man said
In faint and failing tones.
A moment later he was dead,
And Tambourine was Bones.
—Tinley Roquot
The friendship of Crocker I tenderly prize—
I wear many kinds of his collars.
He's endeared to my heart by the sacred ties
Of a thousand accessible dollars.
—Rare Ben. Truman
Enough is as good as a feast—for that matter
Enougher's as good as a feast and the platter.
—Arbely C. Strunk
- Emulation adapted to the meanest capacity.
- The feeling that provokes a preacher to denounce the Adversary.I curse you, Jack Satan, in horns and in hoof
For you're a competing divine,
And the souls you pull into your pit are a proof
That your pull-pit is bigger than mine.
—Rare Ben. Truman
- An opponent of Epicurus, an abstemious philosopher who, holding that pleasure should be the chief aim of man, wasted no time in gratification of the senses.
- A person who is overmuch given to pleasures of the table. So called from Epicurus, a philosopher widely celebrated for his abstemious habits, as a condition favorable to the cultivation of intellectual enjoyment.
- A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterized by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom. Following are some of the more notable epigrams of the learned and ingenious Dr. Jamrach Holobom:
- We know better the needs of ourselves than of others. To serve oneself is economy of administration.
In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.
There are three sexes: males, females and girls.
Beauty in women and distinction in men are alike in this: they seem to the unthinking a kind of credibility.
Women in love are less ashamed than men. They have less to be ashamed of.
While your friend holds you affectionately by both your hands you are safe, for you can watch both his.
A short, sharp and ingenious thought commonly expressed in verse. The following noble example of the epigram is from the inspired pen of the great Californian poet, Hector A. Stuart.
When God had fashioned this terrestrial frame
And given to each created thing a name,
He saw His hands both empty, and explained:
"I've nothing left." The nothing that remained
Said: "Make me into something light and free"
God heard, and made it into brains for me!A short sharp saying, commonly in rhyme, characterized by a vivacious acidity of thought calculated to make him of whom it is written wish it had been an epitaph instead.
Once Hector Stuart in his tersest mood
Took up his pencil. "By the holy rood!"
He cried, "I'll write an epigram." He did—
Nay, by the holy mile his pencil slid.
- An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect. Following is a touching example:Here lie the bones of Parson Platt,
Wise, pious, humble and all that,
Who showed us life as all should live it;
Let that be said—and God forgive it! A monumental inscription designed to remind the deceased of what he might have been if he had had the will and opportunity. The following epitaphs were copied by a prophet from the headstones of the future:
"Here lies the remains of great Senator Vrooman,
Whose head was as hard as the heart of a woman—
Whose heart was as soft as the head of a hammer.
Dame Fortune advanced him to eminence, d——her!""We mourn the loss
Of Senator Cross.
If he'd perished later
Our grief had been greater.
If he never had died
We should always have cried.
As he died and decayed
His corruption was stayed.""Beneath this mound Charles Crocker now reposes;
Step lightly, strangers—also hold your noses.""The doctors they tried to hold William Stow back, but
We played at his graveside the sham and the sackbut."
So wide his erudition's mighty span,
He knew Creation's origin and plan
And only came by accident to grief—
He thought, poor man, 'twas right to be a thief.
—Romach Pute
- The degree of favorable regard that is due to one who has the power to serve us and has not yet refused.
- Payment in full for a benefaction.
- The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists.
- A science that recognizes the difference between a Chinaman and a Nigger, but is oblivious to the difference between a gentleman and a blackguard.
When first Society was founded,
It was discovered, as time sped,
That men of sense and taste abounded,
But they were mostly dead.
While, of the women fitted to adorn
The social circle, few had yet been born.Those, then, that met were rather lonely,
And scarce could call themselves "our set";
So they, to swell their numbers only,
Invented Etiquette,
And said: "Such fools as will observe these rules
May meet us, though they're all the greater fools."Straightway the fools then fell to study
The laws of conduct à la mode,
And though their minds were somewhat muddy
They soon had learned the code.
Then, seeing its authors hadn't, plainly told them
They'd make Society too hot to hold them.
- A genus of trees remarkable for their abundance of assorted ill smells—including the Eucalyptus disgustus, the E. nasocompressus and the E. skunkatus.
- A tree holding, in the vegetable kingdom, the high and honored distinction enjoyed in the animal kingdom by the blue skunk. The variety most in favor is the E. disgustifolium. The medicinal value of its foliage is very great—it cures happiness.
A dispute once unhappily arose among the members of this sect as to what it was that they ate. In this controversy some five hundred thousand have already been slain, and the question is still unsettled.
- A figure of speech in which the speaker or writer makes his expression a good deal softer than the facts would warrant him in doing; as, for example, in the famous triolet of the Rev. Adiposus Drowze, rector of the Church of St. Sinecure, this Diocese:Iscariot blundered in selling for thirty,
And all the Jews wondered that Judas had blundered.
By asking a hundred his crime were less dirty.
Iscariot blundered in selling for thirty. In rhetoric, a figure by which the severe asperity of truth is mitigated by the use of a softer expression than the facts would warrant—as, to call Mr. Charles Crocker ninety-nine kinds of a knave.
Hail, high Excess—especially in wine.
To thee in worship do I bend the knee
Who preach abstemiousness unto me—
My skull thy pulpit, as my paunch thy shrine.
Precept on precept, aye, and line on line,
Could ne'er persuade so sweetly to agree
With reason as thy touch, exact and free,
Upon my forehead and along my spine.
At thy command eschewing pleasure's cup,
With the hot grape I warm no more my wit;
When on thy stool of penitence I sit
I'm quite converted, for I can't get up.
Ungrateful he who afterward would falter
To make new sacrifices at thine altar!
- This "excommunication" is a word
In speech ecclesiastical oft heard,
And means the damning, with bell, book and candle,
Some sinner whose opinions are a scandal—
A rite permitting Satan to enslave him
Forever, and forbidding Christ to save him.
—Gat Huckle A religious rite whereby a person who has offended a priest is given over to the devil to be eternally damned for the betterment of his soul. In the lesser excommunication, however, the offender is only denied the privilege of putting his God into his stomach.
LUNARIAN: Then when your Congress has passed a law it goes directly to the Supreme Court in order that it may at once be known whether it is constitutional?TERRESTRIAN: O no; it does not require the approval of the Supreme Court until having perhaps been enforced for many years somebody objects to its operation against himself—I mean his client. The President, if he approves it, begins to execute it at once.
LUNARIAN: Ah, the executive power is a part of the legislative. Do your policemen also have to approve the local ordinances that they enforce?
TERRESTRIAN: Not yet—at least not in their character of constables. Generally speaking, though, all laws require the approval of those whom they are intended to restrain.
LUNARIAN: I see. The death warrant is not valid until signed by the murderer.
TERRESTRIAN: My friend, you put it too strongly; we are not so consistent.
LUNARIAN: But this system of maintaining an expensive judicial machinery to pass upon the validity of laws only after they have long been executed, and then only when brought before the court by some private person—does it not cause great confusion?
TERRESTRIAN: It does.
LUNARIAN: Why then should not your laws, previously to being executed, be validated, not by the signature of your President, but by that of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?
TERRESTRIAN: There is no precedent for any such course.
LUNARIAN: Precedent. What is that?
TERRESTRIAN: It has been defined by five hundred lawyers in three volumes each. So how can any one know?
An English sea-captain being asked if he had read "The Exile of Erin," replied: "No, sir, but I should like to anchor on it." Years afterwards, when he had been hanged as a pirate after a career of unparalleled atrocities, the following memorandum was found in the ship's log that he had kept at the time of his reply:
Aug. 3d, 1842. Made a joke on the ex-Isle of Erin. Coldly received. War with the whole world!
A transient, horrible, fantastic dream,
Wherein is nothing yet all things do seem:
From which we're wakened by a friendly nudge
Of our bedfellow Death, and cry: "O fudge!"
To one who, journeying through night and fog,
Is mired neck-deep in an unwholesome bog,
Experience, like the rising of the dawn,
Reveals the path that he should not have gone.
—Joel Frad Bink