Devil's Vocab
Words and their definitions as accroding to the Devil's Dictionary.
Terms
undefined, object
copy deck
- Omen
- A sign that something will happen if nothing happens.
- Art
- This word has no definition. Its origin is related as follows by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.
- Wedding
- A ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one, one undertakes to become nothing, and nothing undertakes to become supportable.
- Idiot
- A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The [x]'s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.
- Cannibal
- A gastronome of the old school who preserves the simple tastes and adheres to the natural diet of the pre-pork period.
- X
- in our alphabet being a needless letter has an added invincibility to the attacks of the spelling reformers, and like them, will doubtless last as long as the language. X is the sacred symbol of ten dollars, and in such words as Xmas, Xn, etc., stands for Christ, not, as is popular supposed, because it represents a cross, but because the corresponding letter in the Greek alphabet is the initial of his name -- Xristos. If it represented a cross it would stand for St. Andrew, who "testified" upon one of that shape. In the algebra of psychology x stands for Woman's mind. Words beginning with X are Grecian and will not be defined in this standard English dictionary.
- Talk
- To commit an indiscretion without temptation, from an impulse without purpose.
- Hash
- There is no definition for this word -- nobody knows what it is.
- End
- The position farthest removed on either hand from the Interlocutor.
- Kindness
- A brief preface to ten volumes of exaction.
- Non-Combatant
- A dead Quaker.
- Justice
- A commodity which is a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.
- Pedestrian
- The variable (an audible) part of the roadway for an automobile.
- Year
- A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
- Quotation
- The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.
- Mace
- A staff of office signifying authority. Its form, that of a heavy club, indicates its original purpose and use in dissuading from dissent.
- Zeal
- A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.
- Fib
- A lie that has not cut its teeth. An habitual liar's nearest approach to truth: the perigee of his eccentric orbit.
- Symbol
- Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something else. Many symbols are mere "survivals" -- things which having no longer any utility continue to exist because we have inherited the tendency to make them; as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. They were once real urns holding the ashes of the dead. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.
- Virtues
- Certain abstentions.
- Good
- Sensible, madam, to the worth of this present writer. Alive, sir, to the advantages of letting him alone.
- Baby
- A misshapen creature of no particular age, sex, or condition, chiefly remarkable for the violence of the sympathies and antipathies it excites in others, itself without sentiment or emotion. There have been famous babes; for example, little Moses, from whose adventure in the bulrushes the Egyptian hierophants of seven centuries before doubtless derived their idle tale of the child Osiris being preserved on a floating lotus leaf.
- Rash
- Insensible to the value of our advice.
- Un-American
- Wicked, intolerable, heathenish.
- Duty
- That which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
- Legacy
- A gift from one who is legging it out of this vale of tears.