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

Usage: The consecration in time of something that was originally absurd.

VICIOUS: 1. To be natural. 2. To give up lying. (A word taken from the Zynrxi, and first used by the French at the Siege of Paris to describe the Germans; hence, any one who does anything impolite or acts in any way strictly in accordance with his innate tastes.)

Venom: 1. The juice of hate. 2. The sap of reformers, moralists and socialists. 3. The deadly smile of the optimist when he looks at the under dog. 4. The physical sweat of a defeated candidate and the emotional sweat of old maids. (Venom, like everything else, is subject to the law of evolution and variation. Between the venom of Cain and the venom of Tolstoy, several million instances could be quoted to prove the universality and beneficence of this breedy instinct.)

Victory: A matter of staying-power.

Vacillation: The prominent feature of weakness of character.

Vaudeville: A matter of verve, nerve and vermilion.

Veracity: The appendix vermiformis of the human character; a quaint atavistic instinct. (Veracity was once quite common in the childhood of the race; but as herding became more and more complex and human relations became more and more interjangled, there came into being a species of bipeds known as doctors, lawyers, politicians, editorial writers and preachers. Coeval with their birth the instinct to veracity weakened perceptibly until it reached the condition of nixus nihilus ni in which we hold it today.)

Vacation: A period of increased and pleasurable activity when your wife is at the seashore.

Vivisection: Blood-lust, screened behind the sacred name of Science.

Vile: 1. Anything that serves; whatever is useful. 2. Something done or thought by some one else.

Vindication: The subtlest form of irony.

WADSWORTH: 1. A fabled people, whose remains are found in the Genesee Valley, who chased an anise-seed bag around the steamheat and pretended to be bored by existence. 2. Any one with more buzz-fuzz than brains.

Warrior: 1. A soldier de luxe. 2. A successful, patriotic thug who has been dead fifty years or more. 3. A fearless person who gains renown by the number of alcoholic drinks he has taken in a day and by the variety and virulence of the venereal diseases he has contracted. 4. A myth, a fable, a lie.

Waves: The thoughts of the sea, which, like human wave-thoughts, roll on, roll back, roll up and spray the void.

Wealth: A cunning device of Fate whereby men are made captive, and burdened with responsibilities from which only Death can file their fetters.

Wife: 1. In good society, a publicity agent who advertises her husband's financial status through conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure. 2. In the submerged tenth, a punching-bag and something handy for batting up flies. 3. A man's mental mate, and therefore his competitor in the race for power. 4. The other half of the sphere. (This view is usually regarded as a vagary, and any one holding it is apt to be pointed out as strange, peculiar, erratic and unsafe.)

Wine: An infallible antidote to commonsense and seriousness; an excuse for deeds otherwise unforgivable.

Wisdom: A term Pride uses when talking of Necessity.

Wise Man: One who sees the storm coming before the clouds appear.

Wit: The thing that fractures many a friendship.

Woman: 1. The First Cause. 2. A being created for the purpose of voting. 3. Any one with an allowance that is occasionally paid, but which can't be collected. 4. A pet, a plaything, a scullion, a thing to die for, or a thing to kill. 5. A being to get rid of or to secure – to run away from, or with, as the case may be. 6. Among the Ancients, a slave, a chattel; among the Moderns, a financial swashbuckler. Synonyms: sphinx, devil, angel, liar, spendthrift.

War: The sure result of the existence of armed men.

We: The smear of life against the radiant x.

Whisky: The Devil's right bower.

Words: The airy, fairy humming-birds of the imagination.

Wordsworth (William): The only Lilliputian that slipped under the canvas into Olympus.

Work: 1. That which keeps us out of trouble. 2. A plan of God to circumvent the Devil.

Worms: 1. The final word in criticism. 2. At the last analysis.

Worry: Ironic nurse to old bedridden Dame Care. E. g., "I should worry" – famous saying of the Infinite Nix at twelve o'clock Saturday night of the Sixth Day as he threw down his tools and sent the Earth about its business.

YESTERDAY: 1. One evil less and one memory more. 2. A short-change artist, from whom we can never recover. 3. A period of time that has always existed, in contradistinction to a period of time called tomorrow that can never exist. 4. A mirror wherein if we look long enough we will see ourselves as others could never possibly see us. 5. The Eden of the sentimental. (Time is divided into yesterday, today and tomorrow, which are but three varieties of the same metaphysical tetter. In the beginning was the Infinite, and the Infinite begat Time, and Time begat Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.)

Your Duty: The things you have to do, and not a damn tap more. The other man's duty is the thing you think he should do.

Yours: Anything which up to the present time the bunch has not been able to getaway from you.

ZODIAC: 1. The wallpaper of the heavens. 2. The mirrors of the nothingness of Man and the sublimity of the nothingness of Space.

Zeal: The feeling you have before you secure the thing, as compared with "Stung," which is your condition after you have captured it.

Zone: The region immediately surrounding a Limburger Cheese.

Zero: A round figure often referred to by Doctor Cook in his diary, and which his enemies tried to make symbolic of himself.

Zigzag: The route followed by poets in arriving at truth, as opposed to the direct course which they take for the buffet.

Zeus: A grouchy old god who was so reduced in estate that he posed as a model for Greek artists.

Zephyr: A ladylike blizzard.

Zeitgeist: The things that everybody believes, but that nobody understands.