  The Roycroft Dictionary title THE ROYCROFT DICTIONARYCONCOCTED by DONE INTO A
Copyright 1914
Top of page decoration A DVERTISING: The education of the public as to who you are, where you are, and what you have to offer in way of skill, talent or commodity. The only man who should not advertise is the man who has nothing to offer the world in way of commodity or service. bullet Abel: The first squealer. bullet Abhorrence: 1. A pronounced feeling of dislike in the presence of what is superior or unattainable. 2. To discover one's real self and to slander somebody or something else in revenge. 3. A form of hate that suffers from mal de mer. bullet Asbestos: 1. The white-hope of the damned. 2. A specially prepared paper bullet Arson: To be careless in the use of fire. (General Sherman was at times more or less careless in the use of fire on his March to the Sea.—Hon. Henry W. Grady.) bullet Aeronaut: A person who goes up in order to come down. Hence, a meta-physician. bullet Abnormal: To have intelligence, character or genius; to be less stupid than one's neighbor; to be better than the worst; to be one's self. E. g., the writer of these lines. bullet Abode: 1. A place where one cleans one's teeth and occasionally sleeps. 2. A long counter with a gutter and a rail at the bottom over which one is served with any liquid in a glass. 3. Dwelling, fireside bullet Abnegation: A plan for securing the thing in the easiest and surest way. bullet Academic: 1. Of, or pertaining to, fossils; vegetative; parasitic; the opposite of change, viable, evolution. 2. Relating to a society that promotes the love of the static and the immobile. 3. Apish, parrot-like, phonographic. bullet Adieu: A prayer of thanksgiving uttered at parting. bullet Acquaintance: Any one we bow to politely at the opera or shake hands with warmly in a barroom, but whom we would kick out of our homes. Hence, any one who has refused us a loan. bullet Act: 1. Thought in motion. 2. An actor bullet Abyss: 1. The measureless gulf between literature and the American magazine. 2. The distance between a thinker and an editorial writer. bullet Army: A body of humanitarians that seeks to impress on another body of men the beauty of non-resistance, by exterminating them. bullet Aborigine: 1. A natural, unaffected person; one who has no conscience, who is honest, upright, and always at war. 2. A Deist, a Pantheist, who sees God in everything and feels His presence everywhere, even in his cannibalistic rites; hence, the first thinker in any country. 3. One who hates civilization and the Ladies' Hum Journal. 4. Any one who is mulcted, robbed, murdered, butchered, betrayed, in the name of progress. bullet Anarchist: 1. A Christian dilettante; one who casts a shadow on tomorrow while waiting for the Greek Kalends. 2. A mouther of sublime inanities. 3. One who maps and surveys the air and constructs dainty Utopias with the building-blocks quarried from his unbelievable credulity. 4. In the insane asylum of idealists, a man who imagines himself to be God. 5. A militant bourgeois who has deserted both Rome and Reason because he can not stand competition. bullet American Plan: A scheme for shortening human life through overeating. bullet Ananias: 1. The first ad-writer. 2. Any person who adapts the truth to his needs. 3. An ancient Saint George who slew the dragon Truth—hence, any popular hero or revealer who displays his grinders. bullet Agriculturist: One who makes his money in town and blows it in the country. bullet Anger: 1. A violent blushing and scampering up and down of the blood upon hearing the truth about ourselves; an epileptic condition produced by the presentation of a bill that is not yet due, just due, or overdue. A sudden tumescence of the ego and a furious exaltation of verbal powers upon losing a collar-button. 2. Before election, the righteous wrath of a candidate in the presence of evils that he has invented; after election-day, his wail in the presence of the grave he did not dig. E. g., The devil (taking final leave of the Lord): "I am in anger with thee, Sire." The Lord: "For thee, son, 't will be a long time between heavens. So go to Hell and take thine Anger with thee." bullet Admission: 1. To lie frankly and truthfully about something that can not possibly incriminate you. 2. To go into a place where one is not wanted; as, "A burglar gained admission to my house." bullet Admiration: 1. The smile of Spite. 2. To secretly wish evil to one who has given us pleasure. 3. A form of shamefaced flattery. 4. To murder and go scot-free. E. g., "I admire him very much." "Ah, so that is the reason he has become thoughtful!" From Bean's Meditations of a Vegetarian. bullet Afterward: A space of time in which something happens after something else has happened, as, life, death; love, disillusion; riches, gout; wine, headache; unselfishness, regret. bullet Assembly: The Pantheon of the mediocre. bullet Autobiography: 1. Auto-intoxication. 2. Things which no one else will say about you, and which therefore you have to say of yourself. bullet Apostle: 1. A machine for recording a lie. 2. A person who has grown round-shouldered from following the spoor of another. 3. A lickspittle needed by philosophers in their business. bullet Albany: 1. A place beyond which Henry Hudson could not go. 2. The lobby of the White House. 3. Famous in history by the biennial meetings of the Blackmailers' Club. 4. Any place wherein a capitol is burned at a pre-established psychological moment. (There is a famous proverb which says, "Those who are in Albany escaped Sing Sing, and those who are in Sing Sing were on their way to Albany.") bullet Athens: See Pericles and Aspasia. bullet Art: 1. The vengeance of the Ideal on the Real. 2. Anything done by a man or a woman on paper, canvas, marble or a musical keyboard that people pretend to understand, and sometimes buy. 3. The antithesis of whatever becomes popular in the cultured world. 4. To cast out the dragons of virtue and hypocrisy by committing some imaginary sin and telling the world about it. 5. The beautiful way of doing things. 6. The expression of a man's joy in his work. 7. A matter of hair-cut and neckties. 8. The uplifting of the beautiful so that all may see and enjoy. 9. The utilization of love's exhaust. 10. Love's by-product. bullet Art-Collector: A man who operates a morgue for things rich, rare and precious. bullet Atheist: Any man who does not believe in himself. bullet Athlete Mex: Any man who throws the bull. bullet Atonement: 1. Embolism of the will. 2. To raise a sin from a vice to a virtue. 3. A borax that kills the vermin of remorse, but that can not be relied upon to kibosh their breeding-place. 4. An immunity-bath in preparation for transgressions to come. (Among certain religious sects, the Day of Atonement is the day on which all gonofs line up for a fresh start.) bullet Attention: Concentration of the mind on whatever will ultimately put something in the pocket; hence, in law and politics, the frame-up. Bottom of page decoration
Top of page decoration B ACK: 1. That part of the body to which your friend directs his remarks when he tells you the truth. 2. A smooth surface composed of skin and bones which stretches between Land's End and John O'Groat's. bullet Bal-Masque: The coronation of Mephisto. bullet Balivorax: A Battle Creek Bellifiller, made from selected fidoes, fuddies, fresh freddies, chibots and chitterlings. Ladies love it, babies cry for it, and men who eat it are loved by the ladies who love it who have babies who cry for it. This is the filler fidgeted for by Juno before she weaned Hercules—who was no bottle-baby—and fed to him afterward. Ask your Bagpiper and take no other. bullet Beatitude: A rare and evanescent mental state caused by the reception of money that one has not earned. Synonyms: Windfall, remittance. bullet Beggar: A robber who has lost his nerve—a bandit with a streak of yellow in his ego. bullet Biddle: The act of introducing a prizefight in a Sunday School. bullet Billysunday: 1. A theological jumping-jack, jerked by financial strings. 2. Any one with a pious emotional jag. 3. Hypnosis at so much per. 4. A person intent on saving his soul by religious rigmarole at the expense of reason. 5. To paddle away to Paradise in an orthodox canoe, and feel happy in the thought that most of the folks on the Big Ship are going to Hell. bullet Bloomingdale: A condition of mind. bullet Bastard: Any man who doubts his own immaculate conception. bullet Bean: A dynamic spheroid, combustible under certain conditions. bullet Blaberino: Any person who tells a person something a person says about him, which puts fishbones in the throat and brickbats in the Ostermoor of the person told. bullet Booty: 1. Whatever belongs to somebody that really belongs to somebody else, or whatever belongs to somebody else that really belongs to you or ought to belong to you if it did not belong to a third party—hence, anything at all. 2. Property in a transitional stage. bullet Baptism: Hydrocephalic abracadabra. bullet Bard: Anciently a poet; now a Poet-Laureate. bullet Boredom: 1. The essential nature of monogamy. 2. A period or rest between I Did and I Will. 3. A state of divine revelation wherein for a single moment we are carried by the giant of Eternal Inutility to the abysms and summits of the perpetual Nix. (The word boredom comes from Bore, a tired son of Noah. After the subsidence of the waters, Bore wandered about the earth, yawning and gaping and stretching, for at that time malaria oozed from many stagnant pools. Finally, absolutely exhausted, Bore, being afraid to be down on the damp and slimy soil, rested on the seventh day on his own bean, hence boredom.) bullet Bughouse: 1. A condition of mind (See Boston) 2. The place where a person without funds is sent under certain conditions. bullet Business: Looking a payroll in the eye and kiting checks. 2. A method of reducing a landlady to her lowest terms. bullet Businessman: One who gets the business and completes the transaction—all the rest are clerks and laborers. bullet Butler: 1. A Person or Thing that has charge of the servants in a house belonging to another Person or Thing. 2. A tyrant without ears, eyes, organs, dimensions, passions. bullet Brain: A commodity as scarce as radium and more precious, used to fertilize ideas. bullet Bohemia: A good place in which to camp, but a very poor place in which to settle down. bullet Bread: A foodstuff which the rich occasionally give to the poor as a substitute for cake. Bottom of page decoration
Top of page decoration C ANNIBAL: 1. The conceiver and first practitioner of the eucharistic rite. 2. A place where a missionary may have a hell of a time. 3. A Pierrot whose pranks are side-splitting. 4. One who appreciates his fellow-being at his true worth. 5. The most subtle of living ironists. 6. Any one who takes his brother man at his physical valuation. bullet Carelessness: 1. To have an eye on Eternity, wherein nothing matters. 2. To do a thing in the manner of a god who throws dice for the birth or death of a universe. 3. To perform an act wisely, but not too well. bullet Courtesy: 1. The court clothes of any two-legged predatory animal. 2. The oil that makes a juggernaut noiseless. bullet Chums: A condition of sophomorish propinquity that precedes a feud. (See furse and vendetta.) A state of chumminess between persons of opposite sex and suitable ages is more or less in the line of Nature. But that can't-get-along-without-you feeling between persons of the same sex is a form of hate and means that some third party is going to be beaned. bullet Circumstance: 1. The fresh banana-peel just around the corner. 2. Ex-post-facto knowledge of a series of incidents, episodes and laws which, had we known before doing something that we should not have done anyhow, we would have done otherwise, in the same way, or not at all. 3. The Shadowy Iago that follows us up and down life's promenades. 4. Man Friday to Chance. bullet Cerebellum: 1. The knapsack of Intelligence. 2. The pons asinorum between the mind and the cabeza. 3. A place whence, in democracies, politicians draw their strength, and in monarchies where the masses manufacture bombs and guillotines. E. g., "Now suppose," began Professor Sapnoodle, "that a tiny elevator ran up the spine; we should then call the cerebellum the ceiling of the basement." bullet Charity: 1. A thing that begins at home, and usually stays there. 2. Bracing up Ralph Waldo Emerson's reputation by attributing to him literary mousetraps which he should have made, but didn't. (See Cheese.) bullet Children: Exquisite caskets of flesh that hold the scrolls of all our deeds. bullet Chauffeur: The power behind the thrown. bullet Cheek: 1. A drip-pan for tears. 2. Anciently, a part of the face; latterly, among women, the subsoil of rouge. 3. The principal asset of Ex-President Bombastes Furioso. bullet Chef: The Messiah of gluttons; a Borgia of the scullery; one who crochets sweetbreads instead of cooking them. bullet Chalk: A deposit found at the top, bottom and middle and in the space between the bottom and middle and between the middle and top of American literature. (Chalk-line, used generally in the phrase, "to walk a chalk-line"; E. g., the shortest way to reach the poor-house is to walk the chalk-line of probity). bullet Clique: Friendship gone to seed. bullet Committee: A thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour. bullet Christian: 1. One of a sect that despises and rejects the race from which its founder sprang. 2. A person who thinks he believes in a certain creed that he does not believe in, and thus is pied mentally, morally and arithmetically. 3. A man who keeps one day in the week holy and raises hell with folks and fauna the other six—sometimes. bullet Church: A place where the Anointed of the Lord palm themselves off on one another. 2. A hall of echoes. 3. A counterpane for the dead. 4. An edifice wherein inspired fogyism gets its final degree. bullet Chicago Tongue: A lengthening of the unruly member to a hammer-like proportion. bullet Conscience: 1. The muzzle of the will. 2. The Pecksniffian mask of the fundamental Bill Sykes. 3. The aspiration of Rosinante to be Pegasus. bullet Church Unity: Joining my church. bullet Cigarettist: One who is late every morning and fresh every evening. bullet City: 1. Any place where men have builded a jail, a bagnio, a gallows, a morgue, a church, a hospital, a saloon, and laid out a cemetery—hence a center of life. 2. A herding region; any part of the earth where ignorance and stupidity integrate, agglomerate and breed. bullet Civilization: A device for increasing human ills; a machine for the perpetuation of the weak; an ingenious contraption for spreading disease and hunger. (See war, harlot, politician, liar, Teddy, Sulzer, Murphy, hypocrisy, newspaper, forger, jail, policemen, lawyer, walking delegate, capitalist, poverty, clergyman.) E. g., "Do you believe in civilization?" "Yep." From The Confessions of Herr Krupp. bullet Commonsense: The ability to detect values—to know a big thing from a little one. (I'd rather possess Commonsense than to have six degrees from Oxford.—Fingy Conners' Confessions.) bullet Clock: 1. A telltale; a gossip; a blab. 2. A chink through which the Greta Secret leaks. 3. The Big Ben of eternity. bullet Coffin: 1. L'Envoi, the end of the legend. 2. An ornamental candy-box which no one cares to open. 3. A room without a door or a skylight. bullet College: A place where you have to go in order to find out that there is nothing in it. (See Marriage.) bullet College Degree: A social disgenic, as compared with proof of competence. bullet Comic: Tragedy viewed from the wings. bullet Competition: 1. The struggle for a cake of ice in hell. 2. The life of trade, and the death of the trader. bullet Chimeric: To follow the right and get left. E. g., A. He was chimeric. B. All the same, he went to the Chair like a man. bullet Concoction: 1. An imaginative mosaic distinguished from a lie in this, that a lie is "made up" and a concoction is "put together." 2. A social, religious, economic or political allegory, dogma, creed or program which lands some one in power and flattens out those who believe in it. 3. A mixture of dream and reality, sometimes called "Universe" or "World," put together by two strolling Super-Gentlemen Adventurers, sometimes known as God and Satan. bullet Confidence: The one big lesson the world needs most to learn. bullet Conservative: One who is opposed to the things he is in favor of. bullet Compliment: A sarcastic remark with a flavor of truth or not, as the case may be. bullet Console: To stab one in pain with the bare bodkin of pity. bullet Contradiction: 1. Two lies disputing the roadway. 2. A head-on collision in which two trains of thought telescope each other. bullet Coquetry: 1. An eye-shade worn by lubricity. 2. The colored glasses of The-Thing-Itself. 3. The death-tumbrel that Passion builds for its dreams. bullet 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 succumbing to any other form of hypnotic suggestion. bullet 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. bullet Co-operation: Doing what I tell you to do, and doing it quick. bullet 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.) bullet Creed: A metaphor with ankylosis—a figure of speech frozen stiff with fright. bullet Curiosity: 1. A gulf that swallows gods, 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. bullet Critics: Men who quarrel over the motive of a book that never had any. bullet Criminal: One who does by illegal means what all the rest of us do legally. bullet Cromwell (Oliver): The father of Nell Gwynn. bullet Credit: The lifeblood of commerce. bullet Caste: A Chinese Wall that deprives you of the society of sensible people. bullet Cain: The first progressive. Bottom of page decoration
Top of page decoration D AWN: 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. bullet Death: 1. To stop sinning suddenly. 2. To resign one's membership in the Ananias Club. 3. A readjustment of life's forces. bullet Debt: 1. A rope to your foot, cockleburs in your hair, and a clothespin on your tongue. 2. The devil in disguise. bullet 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 bloody deeds. bullet 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.) bullet 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. bullet Democracy: 1. A form of government by popular ignorance. 2. The dwarf's paradise. 3. Any political system where male votes are substitutes for brains. (This word comes from the Abracadabra: "demo," lungs; "crazy," to rule; hence, to rule by caloric.) bullet Dennis: The man who expresses the things he thinks other folks think he thinks. bullet Dollar: A disk of metal which has eucharistic qualities; a sacred, miraculous object, contact with which is looked upon as curative and prophylactic. bullet 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. bullet Diplomacy: An endeavor to side-step Nemesis. bullet 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.) bullet Dignity: 1. A state of spiritual, mental or emotional starchiness that precedes a bluff. 2. A sartorial and tonsorial chef-d'oeuvre. 3. The bodily attitude 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 substitute for power.) bullet 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 Horeb. 6. An alluvium deposited by the waves of Time in the human soul, and which becomes the basis of psychological Mont Blancs. bullet Discord: A guinea-hen, a peacock and a bluejay singing a trio. bullet Disadvantage: Having too many advantages in life. bullet Devil: A god who has been bounced for conduct unbecoming a gentleman. bullet 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. bullet 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 attitude toward the hen. bullet 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. bullet Duty: A pleasure which we try to make ourselves believe is a hardship. bullet Divorce: 1. A legal separation of two persons of the opposite sex who desire to respect and honor each other. 2. A marital derail. bullet Divorcee: 1. A female fugitive from injustice. 2. Any lady who is a Post-Graduate in Love's Correspondence-School. bullet Discontent: 1. Inertia on a strike. 2. The mainspring of progress. 3. The starting-point in every man's career. bullet 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. bullet 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. bullet 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. bullet Duchess: The feminine of Dutchman. bullet Dynamo: Any man who has everything he eats, drinks, smokes and wears, charged. Bottom of page decoration
Top of page decoration E ARTH 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. bullet 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. bullet Education: A form of self-delusion by those who muff every good wheeze. bullet Economics: The science of the production, distribution and use of wealth, best understood by college professors on half-rations. bullet 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. bullet 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. bullet 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. |
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