The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce (best english books to read TXT) 📖

A permanent topic of

conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have

inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal

ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up official weather

bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments

are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.

 

Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,

And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be —

Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth,

With a record of unreason seldom paralleled on earth.

While I looked he reared him solemnly, that incandescent youth,

From the coals that he’d preferred to the advantages of truth.

He cast his eyes about him and above him; then he wrote

On a slab of thin asbestos what I venture here to quote —

For I read it in the rose-light of the everlasting glow:

“Cloudy; variable winds, with local showers; cooler; snow.”

 

Halcyon Jones

 

WEDDING, n. A ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one,

one undertakes to become nothing, and nothing undertakes to become

supportable.

 

WEREWOLF, n. A wolf that was once, or is sometimes, a man. All

werewolves are of evil disposition, having assumed a bestial form to

gratify a beastial appetite, but some, transformed by sorcery, are as

humane and is consistent with an acquired taste for human flesh.

Some Bavarian peasants having caught a wolf one evening, tied it

to a post by the tail and went to bed. The next morning nothing was

there! Greatly perplexed, they consulted the local priest, who told

them that their captive was undoubtedly a werewolf and had resumed its

human for during the night. “The next time that you take a wolf,” the

good man said, “see that you chain it by the leg, and in the morning

you will find a Lutheran.”

 

WHANGDEPOOTENAWAH, n. In the Ojibwa tongue, disaster; an unexpected

affliction that strikes hard.

 

Should you ask me whence this laughter,

Whence this audible big-smiling,

With its labial extension,

With its maxillar distortion

And its diaphragmic rhythmus

Like the billowing of an ocean,

Like the shaking of a carpet,

I should answer, I should tell you:

From the great deeps of the spirit,

From the unplummeted abysmus

Of the soul this laughter welleth

As the fountain, the gug-guggle,

Like the river from the canon [sic],

To entoken and give warning

That my present mood is sunny.

Should you ask me further question —

Why the great deeps of the spirit,

Why the unplummeted abysmus

Of the soule extrudes this laughter,

This all audible big-smiling,

I should answer, I should tell you

With a white heart, tumpitumpy,

With a true tongue, honest Injun:

William Bryan, he has Caught It,

Caught the Whangdepootenawah!

 

Is’t the sandhill crane, the shankank,

Standing in the marsh, the kneedeep,

Standing silent in the kneedeep

With his wing-tips crossed behind him

And his neck close-reefed before him,

With his bill, his william, buried

In the down upon his bosom,

With his head retracted inly,

While his shoulders overlook it?

Does the sandhill crane, the shankank,

Shiver grayly in the north wind,

Wishing he had died when little,

As the sparrow, the chipchip, does?

No ‘tis not the Shankank standing,

Standing in the gray and dismal

Marsh, the gray and dismal kneedeep.

No, ‘tis peerless William Bryan

Realizing that he’s Caught It,

Caught the Whangdepootenawah!

 

WHEAT, n. A cereal from which a tolerably good whisky can with some

difficulty be made, and which is used also for bread. The French are

said to eat more bread per capita of population than any other

people, which is natural, for only they know how to make the stuff

palatable.

 

WHITE, adj. and n. Black.

 

WIDOW, n. A pathetic figure that the Christian world has agreed to

take humorously, although Christ’s tenderness towards widows was one

of the most marked features of his character.

 

WINE, n. Fermented grape-juice known to the Women’s Christian Union

as “liquor,” sometimes as “rum.” Wine, madam, is God’s next best gift

to man.

 

WIT, n. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his

intellectual cookery by leaving it out.

 

WITCH, n. (1) Any ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league

with the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in

wickedness a league beyond the devil.

 

WITTICISM, n. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted, and seldom

noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a “joke.”

 

WOMAN, n.

 

An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a

rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. It is credited by

many of the elder zoologists with a certain vestigial docility

acquired in a former state of seclusion, but naturalists of the

postsusananthony period, having no knowledge of the seclusion,

deny the virtue and declare that such as creation’s dawn beheld,

it roareth now. The species is the most widely distributed of all

beasts of prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe, from

Greeland’s spicy mountains to India’s moral strand. The popular

name (wolfman) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind.

The woman is lithe and graceful in its movement, especially the

American variety (_felis pugnans_), is omnivorous and can be

taught not to talk.

 

Balthasar Pober

 

WORMS’-MEAT, n. The finished product of which we are the raw

material. The contents of the Taj Mahal, the Tombeau Napoleon and the

Granitarium. Worms’-meat is usually outlasted by the structure that

houses it, but “this too must pass away.” Probably the silliest work

in which a human being can engage is construction of a tomb for

himself. The solemn purpose cannot dignify, but only accentuates by

contrast the foreknown futility.

 

Ambitious fool! so mad to be a show!

How profitless the labor you bestow

Upon a dwelling whose magnificence

The tenant neither can admire nor know.

 

Build deep, build high, build massive as you can,

The wanton grass-roots will defeat the plan

By shouldering asunder all the stones

In what to you would be a moment’s span.

 

Time to the dead so all unreckoned flies

That when your marble is all dust, arise,

If wakened, stretch your limbs and yawn —

You’ll think you scarcely can have closed your eyes.

 

What though of all man’s works your tomb alone

Should stand till Time himself be overthrown?

Would it advantage you to dwell therein

Forever as a stain upon a stone?

 

Joel Huck

 

WORSHIP, n. Homo Creator’s testimony to the sound construction and

fine finish of Deus Creatus. A popular form of abjection, having an

element of pride.

 

WRATH, n. Anger of a superior quality and degree, appropriate to

exalted characters and momentous occasions; as, “the wrath of God,”

“the day of wrath,” etc. Amongst the ancients the wrath of kings was

deemed sacred, for it could usually command the agency of some god for

its fit manifestation, as could also that of a priest. The Greeks

before Troy were so harried by Apollo that they jumped out of the

frying-pan of the wrath of Cryses into the fire of the wrath of

Achilles, though Agamemnon, the sole offender, was neither fried nor

roasted. A similar noted immunity was that of David when he incurred

the wrath of Yahveh by numbering his people, seventy thousand of whom

paid the penalty with their lives. God is now Love, and a director of

the census performs his work without apprehension of disaster.

X

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.

Y

YANKEE, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our

Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown.

(See DAMNYANK.)

 

YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

 

YESTERDAY, n. The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire

past of age.

But yesterday I should have thought me blest

To stand high-pinnacled upon the peak

Of middle life and look adown the bleak

And unfamiliar foreslope to the West,

Where solemn shadows all the land invest

And stilly voices, half-remembered, speak

Unfinished prophecy, and witch-fires freak

The haunted twilight of the Dark of Rest.

Yea, yesterday my soul was all aflame

To stay the shadow on the dial’s face

At manhood’s noonmark! Now, in God His name

I chide aloud the little interspace

Disparting me from Certitude, and fain

Would know the dream and vision ne’er again.

 

Baruch Arnegriff

 

It is said that in his last illness the poet Arnegriff was

attended at different times by seven doctors.

 

YOKE, n. An implement, madam, to whose Latin name, jugum, we owe

one of the most illuminating words in our language — a word that

defines the matrimonial situation with precision, point and poignancy.

A thousand apologies for withholding it.

 

YOUTH, n. The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum,

Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of

endowing a living Homer.

 

Youth is the true Saturnian Reign, the Golden Age on earth

again, when figs are grown on thistles, and pigs betailed with

whistles and, wearing silken bristles, live ever in clover, and

cows fly over, delivering milk at every door, and Justice never

is heard to snore, and every assassin is made a ghost and,

howling, is cast into Baltimost!

 

Polydore Smith

Z

ZANY, n. A popular character in old Italian plays, who imitated with

ludicrous incompetence the buffone, or clown, and was therefore the

ape of an ape; for the clown himself imitated the serious characters

of the play. The zany was progenitor to the specialist in humor, as

we to-day have the unhappiness to know him. In the zany we see an

example of creation; in the humorist, of transmission. Another

excellent specimen of the modern zany is the curate, who apes the

rector, who apes the bishop, who apes the archbishop, who apes the

devil.

 

ZANZIBARI, n. An inhabitant of the Sultanate of Zanzibar, off the

eastern coast of Africa. The Zanzibaris, a warlike people, are best

known in this country through a threatening diplomatic incident that

occurred a few years ago. The American consul at the capital occupied

a dwelling that faced the sea, with a sandy beach between. Greatly to

the scandal of this official’s family, and against repeated

remonstrances of the official himself, the people of the city

persisted in using the beach for bathing. One day a woman came down

to the edge of the water and was stooping to remove her attire (a pair

of sandals) when the consul, incensed beyond restraint, fired a charge

of bird-shot into the most conspicuous part of her person.

Unfortunately for the existing entente cordiale between two great

nations, she was the Sultana.

 

ZEAL, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and

inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.

 

When Zeal sought Gratitude for his reward

He went away exclaiming: “O my Lord!”

“What do you want?” the Lord asked, bending down.

“An ointment for my cracked and bleeding crown.”

 

Jum Coople

 

ZENITH,