The Devil’s Dictionary Ambrose Bierce (best ereader for pdf and epub .txt) 📖

enslave him
Forever, and forbidding Christ to save him. —⁠Gat Huckle Executive

An officer of the Government, whose duty it is to enforce the wishes of the legislative power until such time as the judicial department shall be pleased to pronounce them invalid and of no effect. Following is an extract from an old book entitled, The Lunarian Astonished⁠—Pfeiffer & Co., Boston, 1803:

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 anyone know? Exhort

In religious affairs, to put the conscience of another upon the spit and roast it to a nut-brown discomfort.

Exile

One who serves his country by residing abroad, yet is not an ambassador.

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. 3rd, 1842. Made a joke on the ex-Isle of Erin. Coldly received. War with the whole world!

Existence

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!”

Experience

The wisdom that enables us to recognize as an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

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 Expostulation

One of the many methods by which fools prefer to lose their friends.

Extinction

The raw material out of which theology created the future state.

F Fairy

A creature, variously fashioned and endowed, that formerly inhabited the meadows and forests. It was nocturnal in its habits, and somewhat addicted to dancing and the theft of children. The fairies are now believed by naturalists to be extinct, though a clergyman of the Church of England saw three near Colchester as lately as 1855, while passing through a park after dining with the lord of the manor. The sight greatly staggered him, and he was so affected that his account of it was incoherent. In the year 1807 a troop of fairies visited a wood near Aix and carried off the daughter of a peasant, who had been seen to enter it with a bundle of clothing. The son of a wealthy bourgeois disappeared about the same time, but afterward returned. He had seen the abduction and been in pursuit of the fairies. Justinian Gaux, a writer of the fourteenth century, avers that so great is the fairies’ power of transformation that he saw one change itself into two opposing armies and fight a battle with great slaughter, and that the next day, after it had resumed its original shape and gone away, there were seven hundred bodies of the slain which the villagers had to bury. He does not say if any of the wounded recovered. In the time of Henry III, of England, a law was made which prescribed the death penalty for “Kyllynge, wowndynge, or mamynge” a fairy, and it was universally respected.

Faith

Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Famous

Conspicuously miserable.

Done to a turn on the iron, behold
Him who to be famous aspired.
Content? Well, his grill has a plating of gold,
And his twistings are greatly admired.

—⁠Hassan Brubuddy Fashion

A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.

A king there was who lost an eye
In some excess of passion;
And straight his courtiers all did try
To follow the new fashion.

Each dropped one eyelid when before
The throne he ventured, thinking
’Twould please the king. That monarch swore
He’d slay them all for winking.

What should they do? They were not hot
To hazard such disaster;
They dared not close an eye⁠—dared not
See better than their master.

Seeing them lacrymose and glum,
A leech consoled the weepers:
He spread small rags with liquid gum
And covered half their peepers.

The court all wore the stuff, the flame
Of royal anger dying.
That’s how court-plaster got its name
Unless I’m greatly lying.

—⁠Naramy Oof Feast

A festival. A religious celebration usually signalized by gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person distinguished for abstemiousness. In the Roman Catholic Church feasts are “movable” and “immovable,” but the celebrants are uniformly immovable until they are full. In their earliest development these entertainments took the form of feasts for the dead; such were held by the Greeks, under the name Nemeseia,