The Roycroft Dictionary Part 3

d.u.c.h.eSS: The feminine of Dutchman.

DYNAMO: Any man who has everything he eats, drinks, smokes and wears, charged.

EARTH: 1. A small bean-shaped planet, full of noise, nonsense and noddies, created in order to swell the pockets of politicians. 2. A blister produced by the constant abrasion of motion against s.p.a.ce.

EAT: 1. To prolong pain; to satisfy the antic.i.p.atory pleasure of hunger; to deliberately plan the contamination of the drinking-water of a people. 2. The demagogic demands of the belly. 3. A sinful or extravagant act among the dest.i.tute. 4. A sacred rite among the rich. 5.

An artificial aid to conversation and the repet.i.tion of threadbare stories, generally off-color.

EDUCATION: A form of self-delusion by those who m.u.f.f every good wheeze.

ECONOMICS: The science of the production, distribution and use of wealth, best understood by college professors on half-rations.

EDITOR: 1. A person employed on a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

2. A delicate instrument for observing the development and flowering of the deadly mediocre and encouraging its growth. 3. A seraphic embryon; a smooth bore; a bit of sandpaper applied to all forms of originality by the publisher-proprietor; an emictory.

ENEMY: 1. A counter-irritant of which you must get a few, or it's you for fatty degeneration of the cerebrum. 2. The friend who stings you into action. 3. Any one who tells the truth about you.

EMPHASIS: To italicize a lie; to lay great stress on certain sounds that emanate from a larynx and that are intended to hypnotize a tympanum; to be impressive to the point of almost believing ourselves; the double chin of a declarative sentence; oratorical moth-b.a.l.l.s.

ENNUI: 1. The fourth dimension of action. 2. The looking-gla.s.s of the Infinite. 3. A state of time wherein seconds become days and hours become years. 4. A shop that contains nothing but a silent salesman, Death.

EPIGRAM: 1. A vividly expressed truth that is so, or not, as the case may be. 2. A dash of wit and a jigger of wisdom, flavored with surprise.

ENTHUSIASM: The great hill-climber.

EQUITABLE: An ironical term meaning you can fool some of the people all the time.

EQUITY: Simply a matter of the length of the judge's ears.

EUCHARIST: Salvation by the pound, or by the pint. (If one should eat, say, a pound of eucharistic chips and drink two quarts of the holy water a day, one would be cleansed of all sin and be much richer in bacteria.)

ETERNITY: 1. The Sunday of Time. 2. The sublimest thought of the brain of Ignorance. 3. A symphony written by a Beethoven of the ineffable _x_ dimension. 4. The North Pole of the hours. 5. Monstrance of the Holy O.

6. A corrosive acid that obliterates Before and Afterward.

EMANc.i.p.aTED MAN: One who has dared to think for himself, and thus has added to his list of enemies.

EVOLUTION: 1. A word that has recla.s.sified in an entertaining manner our impermeable and eternal ignorance. 2. The growth of a thing from the simple to the complex, and the wasting away of the complex until it is simpler than ever. 3. The one superst.i.tion that is cordially hated by theologues.

EVERYBODY: 1. The square root of zero. 2. The leavings of individuality.

3. An agglomeration of bipeds who subsist on one another's shanks. 4.

The Seventh Heaven of stupidity. 5. The cosmos of the pinhead. 6. n.o.body in toto. 7. The collective and organized wisdom of the lowest forms of animal intelligence.

EXPECTANCY: An exciting interval between rounds.

EXPECTATION: 1. An optimistic feeling about an event that will never occur. 2. The secret of the persecution of the Jews, Christians and Mohammedans by one another. 3. The G.o.ddess of Love. Synonyms: Tomorrow, next week, next year, next century, pretty soon--any imaginary s.p.a.ce of time after the present moment.

EXISTENCE: 1. A metaphysical term which originally meant joy, but which since the beginning of the Christian era has come to mean pain. 2. To be (used only in the phrase "to be d.a.m.ned"). 3. Merely to live, without eating or drinking. (In London, Paris and New York, this phenomenon is quite common.)

EXPERIENCE: 1. The germ of power. 2. The name every one gives his mistakes. 3. Stinging and getting stung.

EXPRESSION: 1. That mode of creation by which we coin things out of our hearts. (Nothing is of any value except that which you create for yourself, and no joy is joy save as it is the joy of self-expression.) 2. Mind speaking through its highest instrument, Man.

EYE: 1. An organ of the human body which sees the universe as it is not, and transmits the same to the brain. 2. The soul's feelers and pickers.

EYEBALL: 1. A small, miraculous globe that has the power to fabulize the external universe. 2. The spectacles of the brain; the peephole of consciousness.

EPITAPH: 1. Postponed compliments. 2. Postmortem bull-con. 3. Qualifying for the Ananias Club.

EUROPEAN: An inhabitant of New York City.

EXECUTIVE: A man who can make quick decisions and is sometimes right.

FARMER: 1. A man who raises early feed for potato-bugs. 2. One who supplies raw stock for vaudeville jokes. 3. A man who makes his money in the country and blows it in when he comes to town. (Farms were first devised as an excuse for the Agricultural Department at Washington.)

FAILURE: 1. The man who can tell others what to do and how to do it, but never does it himself. 2. A man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

FASHION: A barricade behind which men hide their nothingness.

FAME: To have your name paged by the "b.u.t.tons" of a fashionable hotel.

FAITH: 1. The effort to believe that which your commonsense tells you is not true. 2. The first requisite in success.

FAKE: An event that occurs every four years in the United States; hence, by extension, anything popular.

FAMILY LINE: The clothes-line.

FAST TRAIN: One that has no diner.

FEAR: 1. A club used by priests, presidents, kings and policemen to keep the people from recovering stolen goods. 2. The thought of admitted inferiority. 3. The rock on which we split.

FEATHERS: Secondary s.e.x advertis.e.m.e.nts made of fiber and horsetails, and used on ladies' lids as eye-gougers and such.

FEUD: A fool idea fanned into flame by a fool friend.

FEMINIST MOVEMENT: 1. A hot desire to step on the male tumble-bug. 2. An uneasy, eccentric, patho-psychio gyration, caused by disappointment or thwarted ambition. 3. A loose cam or a cosmic monkeywrench in the convolutions.

FIFTH AVENUE: 1. The widow's chance. 2. A rabbit-warren. 3. The underworld of the upper world. (Fifth Avenue begins at the Washington Arch and really ends at Fifty-ninth Street. Above Fifty-ninth Street one goes into the sacred precincts of monasteries and nunneries. In this district the inhabitants are divided into two cla.s.ses: those who barely live and those who live barely.)

FLY: A sententious, epigrammatic stylist who puts a period after each utterance.

FOLDEROL: Talk or conversation of any kind between a man and a woman that does not contain an invitation or a promise.

FORBEARANCE: 1. To forgive an enemy who has been shorn of power. 2. To buy golden opinions of one's self. 3. To slay with irony or pity.

FORECAST: To observe that which has pa.s.sed, and guess it will happen again; to antic.i.p.ate the future by guessing at the past; to predict that an event will happen, if it does, by basing calculations on events that have already happened, if they did. (One may forecast and be right, wrong, or neither. It depends.)