The Roycroft Dictionary, Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days.

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 competitor.

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

Divorce: 1. A legal separation of two persons of the opposite sex 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.

Duchess: 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 space.

Eat: 1. To prolong pain; to satisfy the anticipatory 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 destitute. 4. A sacred rite among the rich. 5. An artificial aid to conversation and the repetition of threadbare stories, generally off-color.

Education: A form of self-delusion by those who muff 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-balls.

Ennui: 1. The fourth dimension of action. 2. The looking-glass 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.

Emancipated Man: One who has dared to think for himself, and thus has added to his list of enemies.

Evolution: 1. A word that has reclassified 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 superstition 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. Nobody 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 Goddess of Love. Synonyms: Tomorrow, next week, next year, next century, pretty soon – any imaginary space 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 damned"). 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 "buttons" 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 sex advertisements 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 classes: 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 passed, and guess it will happen again; to anticipate 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.)

First Requisites: 1. Belief in yourself. 2. Pride in your work. 3. Useful hands, clear eyes, and a good breath.

Forehead: 1. The facade of a cosmic bagnio. 2. A screen that hides the obscene. 3. The ramparts of a portable Bastile.

Fortitude: That quality of mind which does not care what happens so long as it does not happen to us.

Forum: A safety-valve for letting out superfluous air. E. g., "Let the Forum always be open to the people, and let the treasury always be open to us." – From Titus Livy's Psychology of the First Contractor.

Fra: A literary silo that feeds the world.

Frame-Up: See Brandeisism in the last edition of the Century Dictionary.

Friendship: 1. Something that by any other name would be as brittle. 2. A tacit agreement between two enemies to work together for common swag. 3. The aspiration to boredom. 4. To do unto some one that which you would not allow him to do unto you.

Friend: The masterpiece of Nature.

Frat: 1. A scheme whereby you lock the world out by shutting yourself in. 2. A non-productive plan of self-incarceration in a brain bastile by a mental midge of either sex, or none. 3. A make-believe compact for purposes of piffle. (See snip-pity, top-lofty, tabascoish, supercilious.)

GAIETY: 1. An effervescence of spirits produced by the expectation or the receipt of money. 2. The emotion of a poor person on learning of the death of a rich relative.

Gallant: 1. To remember one is a gentleman in spite of one's birth and training. 2. To give up your seat in a car to a woman, and tread on your neighbor's foot to get even. 3. To do a perfectly unselfish act from selfish motives.

Gent: A chauffeur who has a cab-driver for a chum.

Gentleman: One who is gentle toward the friendless.

Glory: The five senses of the dead.

Genius: 1. One who offends his time, his country and his relatives; hence, any person whose birthday is celebrated throughout the world about one hundred years after he has been crucified, burned, ostracized or otherwise put to death. 2. One who stands at both ends of a perspective; simultaneity of sight; to be one's self plus; to be synonym and antonym to everything. 3. The ability to act wisely without precedent – the power to do the right thing for the first time. 4. A capacity for evading hard work.

Giveth: The lisping tense of give. E. g., "He giveth His beloved sleep." – From The Ironic Sayings of Jehovah.

Gossip: 1. Vice enjoyed vicariously – the sweet, subtle satisfaction without the risk. 2. The lack of a worthy theme.

Glutton: A poor man who eats too much, as contradistinguished from a gourmand, who is a rich man who "lives well."

God: 1. The John Doe of philosophy and religion. 2. The first atheist. 3. A puzzle-editor.

God and Satan: The Pathe Freres of existence.

Goddess: A Super-Huzzy mated with an apotheosized Super-Thug.

Good Habits: Mentors and servants that regulate your sleep, your work and your thought.

Good Sport: A man whose soul is equipped with automatic lubrication.

Good Luck: Tenacity of purpose.

Government: A kind of legalized pillage.

Gourmand: A rich man who eats the surplus production of the world's foodstuffs that the starving are too niggardly to purchase.

Grammar: The grave of letters.

Graft: An agrarian expression first used by Ali Baba.

Guesswork: A shallow depression, pit, or cavity in the consciousness of an editorial writer when he is warning the people.

Great Man: One who perceives the unseen, and knows the obvious.

Gutter: The Lourdes of the puritanical mind, where it finds what it seeks.

Groucherino: One whose life is just one dam kick after another.

Gratitude: A lively sense of anticipation concerning favors about to be received.

Gumma: A substance that forms in the cabeza by an overindulgence in mint juleps; hence, to become a Super-Brute or a political Has-Been.

Grief: 1. The telescope of the emotions that unfolds to your eye the meaning of all worlds. 2. The overtones in all joy. 3. The pleasure that lasts the longest. 4. The tears of Memory. 5. The vice of weakness and the virtue of strength.

HAPPINESS: 1. Something that might have happened yesterday, but which will never happen tomorrow. 2. A postprandial state of mind, which is most often a presage of acute gastritis. 3. A loving-cup, the bottom of which is like a sieve. 4. A mental state compounded of wine, women and tobacco. 5. The exploitation and final triumph of an instinct in the individual that society has branded as wicked or dangerous. 6. Forgetting self in useful effort. 7. A habit – cultivate it.

Habit: The buffer of our feelings; the armor that protects our nerve-force; the great economizer of energy.

Heart: An organ in the human body whence comes the impulse to get divorced.

Haggis: The quintessence of all that has been said by all the Presidents, Governors, and Mayors in the United States since Eighteen Hundred Eighty-nine.

Hand: 1. A conventionalized bread-hook. 2. An attachment at the end of the human arm which gives to another a lemon, or something that the owner of the arm can no longer use or that is harmful to him.

Hair: The Olympus of the pediculidæ.

Heaven: 1. The Coney Island of the Christian imagination. 2. Largely a matter of digestion. 3. An orphan asylum where institutionalism reigns. 4. A penitential colony where the virtuous and the good are condemned to eternal fellowship for their stupidities uttered on earth.

Hate: 1. The shoal on which our bark is stranded. 2. A habit.

Has-Been: Any man who thinks he has arrived.

Hell: 1. A Papal bull. 2. An extinct volcano. 3. The Pantheon of the brave. 4. An ancient conflagration that was checked when Voltaire invented the asbestos intellect. 5. A theological corn, wart or tumor. 6. The sense of separateness. 7. Three telephone systems in a town. 8. An invitation to go sightseeing. E. g., "If I'd only had a parachute at the time I would have gone to hell gracefully and taken a record for descent." – From Lucifer's Confessions of a Ticket-o'-Leave Man.

Husband: A booby prize in life's lottery.

Helta-Skelta: The new substitute for Strenuosity. Puts you to sleep while you work. Helta-Skelta is a prepossessing product made from posthole polyglot piecrust, and is warranted free from teddine, swaboda, korona, kabo and karezza. Served face to face with cream or without, it is spit out as soon as chewed, and can not be swallowed. Locate the lavatory and try a free sample.

Hen: The only animal in Nature that can lay around and make money.

Highbrow: 1. A person who has grown so wise that the obvious escapes him. 2. One who reveres knowledge with superstitious awe, and whose worship of observation approaches the ecstatic. 3. One who believes that an atom is a monstrance that conceals the Holy Ghost of Force.

Highflyer: Any man who rides on the running-board, when he might just as well be inside the limousine.

History: 1. A collection of epitaphs. 2. Gossip well told.

Home: 1. A place where we go to change our clothes so as to go somewhere else. 2. The abode of the heart.

Humor: The tabasco sauce that gives life a flavor.

Humility: 1. The slippered patience of the disinherited. 2. The grogginess of the Ego. 3. To recede to the very bottom of one's own littleness. 4. The Marseillaise of the disappointed. 5. The odor of sanctity. 6. An Iago in plush and lavender. 7. Pride getting ready for a Pounce.

Honeymoon: 1. A happiness not quite worn out. 2. A postlude to a wedding-march and a prelude to a funeral ditto. E. g., "I did not drive Adam and Eve out of Eden because they ate my pet pippin, but because they insisted on carrying on their honeymoon before the modest animals." – From The Private Journal of Démiurge.

Hope: 1. A substitute for yesterday. 2. A mask that dying persons wear. 3. A system of metaphysics founded by Ananias. Antonyms: Reason, imagination, experience.

House: 1. A building with four walls and a roof. 2. A rendezvous for burglars. 3. A dormitory for servants. 4. The Mecca of bedbugs. (The difference between a house and a home is this: A house may fall down, but a home is broken up.)

Human Love: The one indestructible thing in Nature.

Human Dynamo: Any man who gets everything charged.

IDEAL: 1. The dreams of a sin to come. 2. The mirage of failure. 3. The venom of the lost. 4. An excuse for murder, tyranny or for self-aggrandizement. 5. Any theory that justifies our secret itch.

Idealist: 1. A glassblower. 2. A somnambulist who insists on stepping out of a solid window into the air. 3. A person who lives in a tower of porcelain and dines on pumpernickel and lobscouse. 4. A man who fills his gasoline-tank with attar of roses and expects the motor to run.

Intelligence: The grand inquisitor that tortures from every truth the confession that it lies, and from every lie a confession of its divine necessity.

Ideal Life: Man's normal life, as we shall some day know it.

If: 1. A tightrope that stretches from But to But. 2. A small, magical, automatic hinge that can swing the doors of Chance in any direction. 3. A fatality endowed with free will. 4. The verbal sword of Damocles. 5. A dizzy precipice at the end of every declarative sentence. 6. A pole around which the future and the past play hide-and-seek. 7. The vorspiel to the piker's threnody. E. g. (Scene: a narrow bridge.): "Let me pass, fellow! my name is Must, and I desire to cross." If (standing in the middle of the bridge): "You damn fool, don't you see I am the end of the bridge? There is no Must nor Might that can go beyond me."

Imitation: The sincerest form of insult.

Ignoramus: Any man who flatters himself that he is educated.

Imagination: 1. A marvelous little multicolored drugget that covers the rough and splintered floor of reality. 2. A haunted chateau. 3. A vestibule between Time and Eternity. 4. The giant enemy of reality. 5. The red Pantheon of Lucifer. 6. The candle-gleam of science; the flambeau of the lover; the constellated nebulæ of the poet. 7. The glittering west-dust of a hidden innominate sun. 8. The seigniory of untrammeled instincts; the fief of unsanctified dreams; the palfrey that carries us toward nebulous spiritual hills. 9. The plasma of gods. 10. Puck strapped to the back of Balaam's ass. 11. The Shakespeare of mental faculties. 12. The avatar of the emotions. 13. A golden key that unlocks the bastile of logic. 14. A ladder to the fourth dimension. 15. A sublime liar. 16. Taking the halter off your thoughts and giving them a good kick behind. 17. Sympathy illumined by brains.

Imitator: A man who succeeds in being an imitation.

Immortality: 1. A reward given to infidels and atheists by a somewhat humorous God, for not groveling before Him and annoying Him with importunities. 2. A system of punishment for suicides, which makes suicide impossible, thereby putting one over on the ingrate who was tired of the gift of life, by compelling him to live forever, willy-nilly. 3. A valueless thing, because unlimited in quantity, which those hotly intent upon achieving will forfeit through the law which provides that that for which we clutch we lose. 4. A condition sought by political officeholders where the incumbent never either dies or resigns. 5. A state of being encouraged by annuitants, and those who live in the Garden of Allah-Money. 6. A flimflam offer by a theologian of inchoate title to improved real estate in the Sky for real estate, rentals and cash on Earth. 7. A doctrine that the rich teach the poor for good and sufficient reasons. 8. Divine Compensation for the starving. 9. A superfluous addition to life; to go on living after one desires and hopes to remain dead.

Independence: An achievement, not a bequest.

Imperialism: Tyranny, hiding behind the sacred name of Humanity.

Infidel: One who defames his Creator and impeaches his own reason by believing in Orthodox Christianity.

Infidelity: To remain faithful to one's self, and to be unfaithful to some one else's faith. In religion, to think; in the marriage institution, to fall in love; in business, to do the thing to the other fellow that the other fellow intends to do to you, and do it first.

Issue: In physiology, something that comes up and out; in politics, something that goes down and in.

Ingratitude: 1. A girl who is too busy to acknowledge receipt of a Christmas present. 2. The portion of the man who has done well; and a fight with the fox you have warmed into life is imminent.

Infusoria: The entire human race with the exception of Homer, Richard Wagner, Dante, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Rodin, Raphael, Æschylus, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer and Edward Bok, in whose tremendous skulls we live and move and have our being, like a whirlwind of germs in the vats of the Absolute.

Ingrate: Any person who has got something for nothing, and wants more on the same terms.

Initiative: Doing the right thing without being told.

Irony: The cactus-plant that sprouts over the tomb of our dead illusions.

JUDICIOUS: 1. A state of mind wherein things are weighed in an imponderable scale; a conjunction of two negatives in a void. 2. To be wanting in foolishness, character or brains. 3. An exquisite and delicate perception of the difference between two things that are exactly alike, or the total unlikeness between two things that are absolutely different. 4. An umbrella to be carried on clear days as well as on rainy ones, thus protecting the possessor from everything. 5. To lie flat on your puss while the juggernaut of Opinion goes over you; to stand perfectly still between two streetcars going in opposite directions. 6. To see what's coming and avoid it by taking all sides.