The Roycroft Dictionary Part 6

LAUGHTER: 1. The sound you always hear when you chase your hat down the street. 2. Nature's rest-cure for tired nerves. 3. The solace of the sad. 4. A facial sunburst that is fatal to the glooms.

LAW: 1. A scheme for protecting the parasite and prolonging the life of the rogue, averting the natural consequences which would otherwise come to them. 2. The crystallization of public opinion.

LAWYER: 1. A person who takes this from that, with the result that That hath not where to lay his head. 2. An unnecessary evil. 3. The only man in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

LEARN: To add to one's ignorance by extending the knowledge we have of the things that we can never know.

LIE: The weapon of defense that kind Providence provides for the protection of the oppressed.

LEVITATION: The creeping up of your trousers when you ride horseback, so that they supply you a necktie.

LANGUAGE: The tool of the mind.

LIBELOUS: To be tactless in type.

LIAR: 1. One who tells the truth about something that never happened; hence, a poet, a preacher, a politician, or an Arctic explorer. 2. An expert witness on the side of the Prosecution, or any witness called by the Defense. 3. One who reasons far ahead of his time; a seer. (As all combinations of facts must occur in endless time, the liar, no matter how absurd his statement, is uttering a truth, because he is stating a fact that has occurred or will occur at some future date. Thus, a liar, in the sense of one who utters a falsehood, can not be said, strictly speaking, to exist. As dirt is merely nectar in the process of evolving, so a liar is an observer born out of his time. He is the victim of a divine prank.)

LITERATURE: The art of saying a thing by saying something else just as good.

LIBERTY: 1. A pa.s.sword in universal use, and hence of no value. 2. The slogan of a party or sect that seeks to enslave some other party or sect. 3. The lost latchkey to the Citadel of Power. 4. The sacred aeroplane of King Ego. 5. The right to go forth unimpeded from any place, and also to come back. 6. The Northwest Pa.s.sage to Nowhere. 7.

The thing Patrick Henry asked for when the bartender asked him what he would have. 8. Only a comparative term. 9. Responsibility--that is why most men dread it.

LIBRARY: A place where the dead lie.

LOGIC: An instrument used for bolstering a prejudice.

LOAFER: The man who is usually busy keeping some one else from working.

LIFE: 1. An ante-mortem statement; the intrigue of force and matter; the insomnia of death; a log-jam on the stream of life. 2. The pursuit of the superfluous. 3. The cupola of a tomb. 4. A game something like Blind Man's Buff. 5. The paradise of liars. 6. A compromise between Fate and Freewill. 7. A warfare between the s.e.xes. 8. What you choose to make it.

9. A bank-account with so much divine energy at your disposal. 10. Just one improper number after another. 11. The interval between the time your teeth are almost through and you are almost through with your teeth. 12. An affirmative between two negatives.

LONELY: A peculiar feeling caused by the presence of one or more bores.

LOVERS: Unconscious comedians.

LOVE: The third rail for Life's Empire State Express. The beginning of all wisdom, all sympathy, all compa.s.sion, all art, all religion.

LIVING: A mode of wasting time from the cradle to the grave consecrated by immemorial usage.

LITIGATION: A form of h.e.l.l whereby money is transferred from the pockets of the proletariat to that of lawyers.

MANKIND: 1. A nomadic savage that has wandered over the face of the earth from East to West in order to reach the East so it could go West again. It has left many traces of its life--barrooms, brothels, jails, churches, gallows, best sellers, etc. 2. In the animal kingdom, a surrept.i.tious and supposit.i.tious supererogation. 3. Among the Simians a place equivalent to our h.e.l.l. "Oh, you go to Mankind," is quite frequently heard in the African jungle, even in the best society.

MAHIN: A jumbo of publicity who puts it over.

MENTAL DISSOLUTION: That condition where you are perfectly satisfied with your religion, education and government.

MAN: 1. A super-simian. 2. Holy dicebox of the devil. 3. G.o.d's sc.r.a.pbook. 4. Anything allowed to stand at a public bar. 5. A biped with feathers in his or her hat. 6. A being said to be the highest work of G.o.d--and who admits it. 7. Any creature that creates a Creator in his own image. 8. A G.o.d in the crib.

MAN-HATER: A woman who, finding herself no longer acceptable to man, flirts with Mephisto.

MARRIAGE: 1. A legal or religious ceremony by which two persons of the opposite s.e.x solemnly agree to hara.s.s and spy on each other for ninety-nine years, or until death do them join. 2. A way-station, not the end of the journey. 3. The aspiration of two vowels to be a diphthong. 4. Love's demita.s.se.

MAYOR: 1. _Particeps criminis._ 2. The head and front of our offending.

3. Polonius Pecksniff, who plays Bottom for a stipend. 4. A chaste, honorable, virtuous person whose private life is made inviolable by the libel laws. 5. A p.r.i.c.kly sensation in the back of Folly and Revelry. 6.

The culmination, zenith, equator and pediment of self-sufficient mediocrity. 7. A crow's-nest from which one may see the perpetually receding horizons of the Governorship and the Presidency. 8. A chef of morality. 9. Any person afflicted with primary, secondary or tertiary holiness. 10. A palm-reader. 11. A nebulous cl.u.s.ter of thought-embryons resolved into a gaseous state. 12. The nosebag of public decency. 13.

The _alter ego_ of organized cant. 14. The critic of impure reason. 15.

Lobster emeritus. 16. A person who takes an oath to love, honor and obey Tartuffe.

MANHOLES: The apertures in a peekaboo shirtwaist.

MARTYR: Any man who is willing to sacrifice others for his "cause."

MASTER-MAN: A man who is master of one person--himself.

MASTERSHIP: Industry, concentration, self-confidence.

MATHEMATICS: A tentative agreement that two and two make four.

MATTEAWAN: The antechamber of liberty for a murder-gent.

MILITARISM: A fever for conquest, with Peace for a shield, using music and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons to dazzle and divert the Populace.

MERCY: 1. The charity of tyrants. 2. The forgiveness of one scoundrel by another. 3. The culmination of the Will-to-Power and its final apotheosis. 4. A quality which, like soup, the more it is strained the less soup and the more water you have. 5. In war a universal mode of subjugating a people.

MEPHISTO: The fourth person in the Holy Trinity.

MILITANCY: A fixed, fighting mental att.i.tude that will never know when the war is over.

MIDNIGHT: 1. The Pole of the hours; a pincushion on which sparkle all the seconds of a day; the keel of the good ship Tomorrow. 2. A chimney whence the dreams of today issue in smoke.

METAPHYSICS: 1. An attempt to define a thing and by so doing escape the bother of understanding it. 2. The explanation of a thing by a person who does not understand it.

MIDDLEMAN: One who works both ends against the middle.

MILLENNIUM: 1. A thousand years beginning with Now and ending with Then.

2. A mythical period when every one will pay his debts and begin tomorrow again on renewed credit. 3. A religious cycle which has no visible means of support, even admitting the ideality of time. Hence, by extension and usage--[Here insert a Mergenthaler pi line of thirty-two ems.]

MAMMON: The Pope of Protestantism.

MUCKRAKER: One who sits on the fence and defames American enterprise as it marches by.

MIRACLE: 1. A happening seen by four men at once, but by no one man in particular--hence, a collective, but otherwise untrue, fact. 2. The minutiae of cosmologies. 3. A physical event described by those to whom it was related by men who did not see it. 4. A portent that precedes the coming of a Liar with letters patent from Nowhere, or a series of extraordinary occurrences that attend his comings and goings and mouthings that in no way equal in majesty, beauty or mystery the simplest commonplace of his life. (No G.o.d, demiG.o.d, or other parasite of human ignorance is complete without miracles, for it is only the natural and commonplace that are unbelievable.)

MOTHERHOOD: The headliner in G.o.d's great vaudeville.

MISSIONARIES: Sincere, self-deceived persons suffering from meddler's itch.