The Roycroft Dictionary Part 2

CONSERVATIVE: One who is opposed to the things he is in favor of.

COMPLIMENT: A sarcastic remark with a flavor of truth or not, as the case may be.

CONSOLE: To stab one in pain with the bare bodkin of pity.

CONTRADICTION: 1. Two lies disputing the roadway. 2. A head-on collision in which two trains of thought telescope each other.

COQUETRY: 1. An eye-shade worn by lubricity. 2. The colored gla.s.ses of The-Thing-Itself. 3. The death-tumbrel that Pa.s.sion builds for its dreams.

CONSCIOUSNESS: A state wherein one becomes aware that he is being robbed, swindled or duped, by either a natural or an artificial law.

Aside from his periods of sleep it may be said that man is always in a state of consciousness when voting, making love, or when succ.u.mbing to any other form of hypnotic suggestion.

CONVERSION: 1. To be suddenly seized by fright before a fiction or a fact. 2. To execute a mental and moral pirouette from one absurdity to a worse one. 3. To exhaust one pleasure and seek redemption in another. 4.

A backslider from your own ideas to those of an inferior.

CO-OPERATION: Doing what I tell you to do, and doing it quick.

COURAGE: 1. A matter of the red corpuscle. 2. A matter of getting used to it. (It is oxygen that makes every attack, and without oxygen in his blood to back him, a man attacks nothing--not even a pie.--From Wilbur Nesbit's book _Bunc as I Have Found It_.)

CREED: A metaphor with ankylosis--a figure of speech frozen stiff with fright.

CURIOSITY: 1. A gulf that swallows G.o.ds, men, creeds, matter, worlds, philosophies. 2. A peephole in the brain through which one sees the pomp and ceremony of the Absurd. 3. A monstrous antenna that feels its way through matter and mind, and founders in the Infinite. 4. At its lowest, the instinct that boosts us up to peep over our neighbor's transom, symboled by a knot-hole.

CRITICS: Men who quarrel over the motive of a book that never had any.

CRIMINAL: One who does by illegal means what all the rest of us do legally.

CROMWELL (OLIVER): The father of Nell Gwynn.

CREDIT: The lifeblood of commerce.

CASTE: A Chinese Wall that deprives you of the society of sensible people.

CAIN: The first progressive.

CREATOR: A man possessing initiative.

DAWN: 1. The beginning of a daily instalment in a serial story that will never end. 2. That mystical hour wherein Dives goes belching into dreamland and Lazarus comes out yawning carrying a dinner-pail.

DEATH: 1. To stop sinning suddenly. 2. To resign one's membership in the Ananias Club. 3. A readjustment of life's forces.

DEBT: 1. A rope to your foot, c.o.c.kleburs in your hair, and a clothespin on your tongue. 2. The devil in disguise.

DEMAGOGUE: One whose highest ambition is to stand on the grave of a great dead industry and boast to an army of unemployed of his b.l.o.o.d.y deeds.

DECALOGUE: 1. The stakes that hold in its place the social circus-tent.

2. A collection of commandments formulated by a person who has broken them all. 3. An incubator in which eaglets are transformed into capons.

4. A fence that confines animals that can not climb or fly. (The most famous Decalogue is known as the Ten Commandments. Whoso has obeyed this Decalogue in toto has died obscure, poor, unsung, unwept, and overlooked by Clio.)

DOGMA: 1. A hard substance which forms in a soft brain; a coprolitic idea; a lie imperiously reiterated and authoritatively injected into the mind of one or more persons who believe they believe what some one else believes. 2. A paying thought or doctrine. 3. A recession into the Divine or Imperial--hence, the father of graft.

DEMOCRACY: 1. A form of government by popular ignorance. 2. The dwarf's paradise. 3. Any political system where male votes are subst.i.tutes for brains. (This word comes from the Abracadabra: "demo," lungs; "crazy,"

to rule; hence, to rule by caloric.)

DENNIS: The man who expresses the things he thinks other folks think he thinks.

DOLLAR: A disk of metal which has eucharistic qualities; a sacred, miraculous object, contact with which is looked upon as curative and prophylactic.

DIARY: 1. To see one's self as no one else cares to see us. 2. A book that describes the birth, effulgence and disappearance of pimples. 3.

The lavatory of literature.

DIPLOMACY: An endeavor to side-step Nemesis.

DIPLOMAT: A man who says "perhaps" when he means no, as opposed to a woman who says "perhaps" when she means yes. (A man who says "no" is not a diplomat, and a woman who says "yes" is not a lady.)

DIGNITY: 1. A state of spiritual, mental or emotional starchiness that precedes a bluff. 2. A sartorial and tonsorial _chef-d'uvre_. 3. The bodily att.i.tude of a speaker or a preacher in the presence of people whose duty it is to believe he is not lying to them. 4. A mask we wear to hide our ignorance. (Man has dignity, woman has poise, animals have power; hence, dignity in a man or woman is anything that is a subst.i.tute for power.)

DISAPPOINTMENT: 1. The cradle of the ideal. 2. The skeleton of Purpose and the skull and crossbones of Desire. 3. A feeling in regard to the past that comes to every one on the Thirty-first of each December. 4.

The final issue of any act begun yesterday, today or tomorrow. 5. The original road to Damascus and h.o.r.eb. 6. An alluvium deposited by the waves of Time in the human soul, and which becomes the basis of psychological Mont Blancs.

DISCORD: A guinea-hen, a peac.o.c.k and a bluejay singing a trio.

DISADVANTAGE: Having too many advantages in life.

DEVIL: A G.o.d who has been bounced for conduct unbecoming a gentleman.

DOCTOR: 1. A person who has taken seriously the biblical injunction, "Physician, heel thyself!" 2. In Germany, a swashbuckler person with many scars, much admired by small boys and unhappily married ladies, and feared by shopkeepers.

DISINTERESTED: 1. Whatever is inconceivable. 2. A hypothetical ether that surrounds all forms of selfishness and naturalness. 3. That psychological interval when we look the other way before making a grab.

4. A monkey's mental att.i.tude toward the hen.

DISHONORABLE: 1. To avoid infamy and almost attain respectability. 2.

The first feeling we entertain toward each new acquaintance. 3. Any action whatsoever committed by a compet.i.tor.

DUTY: A pleasure which we try to make ourselves believe is a hardship.

DIVORCE: 1. A legal separation of two persons of the opposite s.e.x who desire to respect and honor each other. 2. A marital derail.

DIVORCEE: 1. A female fugitive from injustice. 2. Any lady who is a Post-Graduate in Love's Correspondence-School.

DISCONTENT: 1. Inertia on a strike. 2. The mainspring of progress. 3.

The starting-point in every man's career.

DISINHERIT: 1. The prankish action of the ghosts in cutting the pockets out of trousers. 2. To leave great sums of money to lawyers. 3. A method of insuring postmortem notoriety--and disappointment.

DOUBTER: 1. One who picks his teeth, blows his nose on his napkin, and yawns at the Lord's table. 2. A good-for-nothing who does not knock before entering the bathroom of the Faithful.

DREAM: 1. A place where the starving feel the pangs of gluttony, and the threadbare wear opera-hats and spats. 2. A magic mirror wherein the dead appear to mock us with their happiness. 3. A cerebral phenomenon caused on upper Fifth Avenue by eating too much, and on the lower East Side by eating too little. 4. The Valhalla and the Welsh Rabbit; the Brocken where the souls of the animals, fish and birds we have eaten hold their revels; a private theater where indigestion is the prompter.