The Roycroft Dictionary, Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days.. Hubbard Elbert
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The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days
The Roycroft Dictionary
ADVERTISING: The education of the public as to who you are, where you are, and what you have to offer in way of skill, talent or commodity. The only man who should not advertise is the man who has nothing to offer the world in way of commodity or service.
Abel: The first squealer.
Abhorrence: 1. A pronounced feeling of dislike in the presence of what is superior or unattainable. 2. To discover one's real self and to slander somebody or something else in revenge. 3. A form of hate that suffers from mal de mer.
Asbestos: 1. The white-hope of the damned. 2. A specially prepared paper upon which The Philistine is printed.
Arson: To be careless in the use of fire. (General Sherman was at times more or less careless in the use of fire on his March to the Sea. —Hon. Henry W. Grady.)
Aeronaut: A person who goes up in order to come down. Hence, a meta-physician.
Abnormal: To have intelligence, character or genius; to be less stupid than one's neighbor; to be better than the worst; to be one's self. E. g., the writer of these lines.
Abode: 1. A place where one cleans one's teeth and occasionally sleeps. 2. A long counter with a gutter and a rail at the bottom over which one is served with any liquid in a glass. 3. Dwelling, fireside (obsolete in this sense). 4. A grave.
Abnegation: A plan for securing the thing in the easiest and surest way.
Academic: 1. Of, or pertaining to, fossils; vegetative; parasitic; the opposite of change, viable, evolution. 2. Relating to a society that promotes the love of the static and the immobile. 3. Apish, parrot-like, phonographic.
Adieu: A prayer of thanksgiving uttered at parting.
Acquaintance: Any one we bow to politely at the opera or shake hands with warmly in a barroom, but whom we would kick out of our homes. Hence, any one who has refused us a loan.
Act: 1. Thought in motion. 2. An actor who says he gets three thousand a week.
Abyss: 1. The measureless gulf between literature and the American magazine. 2. The distance between a thinker and an editorial writer.
Army: A body of humanitarians that seeks to impress on another body of men the beauty of non-resistance, by exterminating them.
Aborigine: 1. A natural, unaffected person; one who has no conscience, who is honest, upright, and always at war. 2. A Deist, a Pantheist, who sees God in everything and feels His presence everywhere, even in his cannibalistic rites; hence, the first thinker in any country. 3. One who hates civilization and the Ladies' Hum Journal. 4. Any one who is mulcted, robbed, murdered, butchered, betrayed, in the name of progress.
Anarchist: 1. A Christian dilettante; one who casts a shadow on tomorrow while waiting for the Greek Kalends. 2. A mouther of sublime inanities. 3. One who maps and surveys the air and constructs dainty Utopias with the building-blocks quarried from his unbelievable credulity. 4. In the insane asylum of idealists, a man who imagines himself to be God. 5. A militant bourgeois who has deserted both Rome and Reason because he can not stand competition.
American Plan: A scheme for shortening human life through overeating.
Ananias: 1. The first ad-writer. 2. Any person who adapts the truth to his needs. 3. An ancient Saint George who slew the dragon Truth – hence, any popular hero or revealer who displays his grinders.
Agriculturist: One who makes his money in town and blows it in the country.
Anger: 1. A violent blushing and scampering up and down of the blood upon hearing the truth about ourselves; an epileptic condition produced by the presentation of a bill that is not yet due, just due, or overdue. A sudden tumescence of the ego and a furious exaltation of verbal powers upon losing a collar-button. 2. Before election, the righteous wrath of a candidate in the presence of evils that he has invented; after election-day, his wail in the presence of the grave he did not dig. E. g., The devil (taking final leave of the Lord): "I am in anger with thee, Sire." The Lord: "For thee, son, 't will be a long time between heavens. So go to Hell and take thine Anger with thee."
Admission: 1. To lie frankly and truthfully about something that can not possibly incriminate you. 2. To go into a place where one is not wanted; as, "A burglar gained admission to my house."
Admiration: 1. The smile of Spite. 2. To secretly wish evil to one who has given us pleasure. 3. A form of shamefaced flattery. 4. To murder and go scot-free. E. g., "I admire him very much." "Ah, so that is the reason he has become thoughtful!" From Bean's Meditations of a Vegetarian.
Afterward: A space of time in which something happens after something else has happened, as, life, death; love, disillusion; riches, gout; wine, headache; unselfishness, regret.
Assembly: The Pantheon of the mediocre.
Autobiography: 1. Auto-intoxication. 2. Things which no one else will say about you, and which therefore you have to say of yourself.
Apostle: 1. A machine for recording a lie. 2. A person who has grown round-shouldered from following the spoor of another. 3. A lickspittle needed by philosophers in their business.
Albany: 1. A place beyond which Henry Hudson could not go. 2. The lobby of the White House. 3. Famous in history by the biennial meetings of the Blackmailers' Club. 4. Any place wherein a capitol is burned at a pre-established psychological moment. (There is a famous proverb which says, "Those who are in Albany escaped Sing Sing, and those who are in Sing Sing were on their way to Albany.")
Athens: See Pericles and Aspasia.
Art: 1. The vengeance of the Ideal on the Real. 2. Anything done by a man or a woman on paper, canvas, marble or a musical keyboard that people pretend to understand, and sometimes buy. 3. The antithesis of whatever becomes popular in the cultured world. 4. To cast out the dragons of virtue and hypocrisy by committing some imaginary sin and telling the world about it. 5. The beautiful way of doing things. 6. The expression of a man's joy in his work. 7. A matter of hair-cut and neckties. 8. The uplifting of the beautiful so that all may see and enjoy. 9. The utilization of love's exhaust. 10. Love's by-product.
Art-Collector: A man who operates a morgue for things rich, rare and precious.
Atheist: Any man who does not believe in himself.
Athlete Mex: Any man who throws the bull.
Atonement: 1. Embolism of the will. 2. To raise a sin from a vice to a virtue. 3. A borax that kills the vermin of remorse, but that can not be relied upon to kibosh their breeding-place. 4. An immunity-bath in preparation for transgressions to come. (Among certain religious sects, the Day of Atonement is the day on which all gonofs line up for a fresh start.)
Attention: Concentration of the mind on whatever will ultimately put something in the pocket; hence, in law and politics, the frame-up.
BACK: 1. That part of the body to which your friend directs his remarks when he tells you the truth. 2. A smooth surface composed of skin and bones which stretches between Land's End and John O'Groat's.
Bal-Masque: The coronation of Mephisto.
Balivorax: A Battle Creek Bellifiller, made from selected fidoes, fuddies, fresh freddies, chibots and chitterlings. Ladies love it, babies cry for it, and men who eat it are loved by the ladies who love it who have babies who cry for it. This is the filler fidgeted for by Juno before she weaned Hercules – who was no bottle-baby – and fed to him afterward. Ask your Bagpiper and take no other.
Beatitude: