The Roycroft Dictionary Part 10

SOCIETY: 1. An erotic clique that reads _Vogue_, _Smart Set_ and _Town Topics_. 2. A congregation of people who are not persons. 3. A vast interchange of service through labor, ideas and commodities. 4. A relish for solitude.

SOCIALISM: 1. A sincere, sentimental, beneficent theory, which has but one objection, and that is, it will not work. 2. A plan by which the inefficient, irresponsible, ineffective, unemployable and unworthy will thrive without industry, persistence or economy. 3. An earnest effort to get Nature to change the rules for the benefit of those who are tired of the Game. 4. A social and economic scheme of government by which man shall loiter rather than labor. 5. A survival of the unfit. 6. A device for swimming without going near the _H_{2}O._. 7. Partic.i.p.ation in profits without responsibility as to deficits. 8. An arrangement for destroying initiative, invention, creation and originality. 9.

Resolutions pa.s.sed by a committee as a subst.i.tute for work. 10. A sentiment which encouraged and evolved would lead to revolution, with dynamiting and destruction as a prominent and recognized part of its propaganda. 11. A system for turning water into wine, kerosene into oyster-soup, and boulders into bread, by pa.s.sing resolutions.

SOCIOLOGY: The religious application of economics.

SORROW: The magical palette upon which Life mixes her colors.

SLAVE: A person with a servile mind, who quickly crooks the pregnant hinges of the knee, that thrift may follow fawning; who gratifies his wants either through cringing flattery or coercion, and who tyrannizes over others whenever he has a chance.

SPECIALIST: 1. One who limits himself to his chosen mode of ignorance, and gets further into a bog than the man ahead of him. 2. A kind of hypnotic trance wherein a person by centering his gaze on a given object renders the object smaller in proportion as his illusion grows.

SOREHEAD: A politician who has reached for something that was not his, and missed.

SOLITUDE: The only thing that can hold the balance true.

SORCERER: 1. Any one who can make the people of the United States believe they rule. 2. A juggler (hence the founder of any religious, political or philosophical system).

SPECIOUS: That form of argument used as an indoor sport by East Aurora natives in an attempt to prove that two or three make four.

SORCERY: The art of charming money out of the pockets of those who do not desire to part with it.

SPINSTERHOOD: An achievement, not a disgrace.

STALL STUFF: 1. Things said to see what the other person will say. 2.

The language used by politicians. 3. All conversation between spoons.

_Example_: Seeing Mr. Jones leave his office, you enter and ask his stenographer this question: "Is Mr. Jones in?" (See Piffle, Pink Tea, Four o'Clock.)

STAR: 1. A milestone in the Infinite. 2. A malicious, ironic eye. 3. A device to show man his insignificance.

STARVATION: 1. The originator of thought. 2. A way to salvation. 3. A physical eccentricity of the stomach. 4. A cure for indigestion. 5. A banting process invented by Lazarus.

SPECIALIZATION: The ability to focus all your energies on one thing.

STUDIO: 1. A place where a model is borne to blush unseen, and contract pneumonia in the chilly air. 2. A rendezvous of would-bes, has-beens and never-wazzers. 3. A place to study the esoteric. 4. The most polite term you can apply to it.

STUPIDITY: 1. The Utopia of the wise, the Lethe forbidden to the lips of genius. 2. The driving power of a Ma.s.s in motion. 3. An incurable state of somnambulism with which mankind is blessed, and under the spell of which it performs the most fantastic actions, such as marriage, balloting, warring, preaching, selling, buying, baptizing. 4. The _leit-motif_ of the Vaudeville called Progressiveness.

SUPERSt.i.tION: 1. Scrambled science flavored with fear. 2. Ossified metaphor.

SURGERY: An adjunct, more or less valuable to the diagnostician.

STYLE: 1. The brogue of the mind. 2. A certain manner or deportment which emanates from those who have neither manner nor deportment. 3. A peculiar and individual manner of doing the unnecessary.

SUBSIDIARY: A compet.i.tor who has come off his perch through threats or bribes, or both.

SUCCESS: 1. A sunset by Turner. 2. A stained-gla.s.s window through which one may see an ironic moon. 3. The final link in a chain of chalk. 4. To rise from the illusion of pursuit to the disillusion of possession. 5.

An inability to further fletcherize. 6. Giving up the fight, being possessed of the fallacy that you have won. 7. Death's lullaby. 8. The accomplishment of one's best. 9. To write your name high upon the outhouse of a country tavern. 10. A constant sense of discontent, broken by brief periods of satisfaction on doing some specially good piece of work. 11. A matter of outliving your sins. 12. A subtle connivance of Nature for bringing about a man's defeat. 13. The realization of the estimate which you place upon yourself. 14. Voltage under control--keeping one hand on the transformer of your Kosmic Kilowatts.

15. A matter of the red corpuscle. 16. The thing that spoils many a good failure. 17. Something that is hideous to all but its victims.

SUCTION: An automatic, murderous and perpetual movement of Society against each individual.

SUPERNATURAL: The natural not yet understood.

SUN: 1. A giant spot-light, which from the wings of s.p.a.ce plays intermittently upon a meaningless ten-twenty-thirty vaudeville show. 2.

The root of all evil, the mother of all beauty, and the final tomb of all that is good, bad or indifferent. 3. A dyehouse, probably the first.

(The sun was once worshiped as a divinity, but later the compet.i.tion between G.o.ds and divinities became so strenuous that the sun was forgotten, hence his casual earthquakes, floods and other little reminders that we and our G.o.ds are only his gimcracks.)

STATUTE: The proof, record and final justification of the infallibility of Ignorance.

STRONG MAN: One who busies himself with the useful tasks that others can not, or will not do, and allows those who can do nothing else to do the easy things.

SYMPATHY: 1. A malady that sometimes afflicts the rich. 2. The lees of the wine-cup offered to another. 3. An impulse toward ourselves through the heart of another. 4. Whatever may be extended to another that does not take the shape of money. 5. The sum of all virtues. 6. The first attribute of love as well as its last. (I am not sure but that sympathy is love's own self, vitalized mayhap by some divine actinic ray. Only the souls who have suffered are well loved.)

TEACHER: 1. A person, either male or female, who instils into the head of another person, either voluntarily or for pay, the sum and substance of his or her ignorance. 2. One who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before.

TALK: To open and close the mouth rapidly while the bellows in the throat pumps out the gas in the brain.

TAFTIAN: Any man who is too cowardly to fight, and too fat to run.

TEMPTATION: A desire to do something you know you should not do.

THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY: A place where young men are taught to silence the questions of the ignorant.

TEMPLE: A place other than a bed, where one takes one's shoes off.

(There are Jewish temples, pagan temples and money temples, but no Christian temples: the latter has no need of them, because Christian religion is the only one in the world in which its believers and followers practise exactly what its Founder taught. Each Christian may point to himself and say proudly, "Ecce Temple," hence, etc., etc., etc.)

THE PHILISTINE: A publication that puts the Syracuse Product on the terminal feathers of the Idea Bird.

THE-SCENE-CHANGES: A device invented by a writer who was running short of Cosmic Gasoline.

TOMORROW: The mother of regret.

THANKSGIVING: 1. A ma.s.s said for the repose of the living. 2. Grat.i.tude in the presence of the death of some one else. 3. The irony of fatality.

4. The instinctive and perpetual atavism of the Will-to-Live.

(Thanksgiving-Day in the United States is a national holiday on which all the people who during the past year have survived earthquake, fire, housemaid's knee and death, overeat and thus thank G.o.d for His favoritism.)

TIGHTWADITY: A disease in which one dollar obstructs the vision to the exclusion of a higher denomination.

TOLERANCE: An agreement to tolerate intolerance.

TODAY: The hea.r.s.e that carries the dreams of yesterday to the cemetery.

THE: An article, aristocratic by birth and breeding, but which degenerates into an adjective in the sentence, "He is THE man of the hour."

THEOLOGY: 1. A hideous juggernaut to whose wheels cling the blood and bone and the flattened flesh of a million dead emotions. 2. Not what we know about G.o.d, but what we do not know about Nature. 3. Obsolete psychology, or the arbitrary rule of a Theos or G.o.d. 4. An engine planned for the purpose of bewildering humanity. 5. Self-deceived egotism, hiding behind the name of Deity. 6. Antique and obsolete philosophy. 7. The science of a non-existent, all-powerful, all-wise and all-loving nix.

THINKER: 1. One who destroys philosophies. 2. One who can make others think.