Redefining misanthropy for a fresh generation. Standard posts begin with a definition from Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary followed by a modern adjustment. Miscellany on Wednesday and storytelling on Saturday.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
Deshabille
DESHABILLE, n. A reception costume for intimate friends varying according to locality, e.g. In Borrioboola Gha, a streak of red and yellow paint across the thorx. In San Francisco, pearl ear-rings and a smile.
2009 Update: Casual or careless garb. According to the lexicographer, the antonym for nudity.
And a very happy birthday to sister AP3. May Facebook fete you as warmly as the blogosphere remembers.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Dragon
DRAGON, n. A leading attraction in the menagerie of the antique imagination. It seems to have escaped.
2009 Update: A genus comprising greater variety in character than either canis or barber. The key traits include a leathery and scaled hide, moral dubiousness, destructive expression and appointment as opposed to election.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Advice to my nephew, Eamon, before his second birthday
Monday's your birthday, make of it the most.
Pull a toy under Murphy and feed him your toast
Bite your mom's ankle, spill your dad's beer,
Frustrate your brother til I hear him scream from here.
Put Bapu's camera into your juice.
Grab Ganny's flowers and pull each petal loose.
Some days are good and some days are bad.
The best days are days you make everyone mad!
EXPEDITION, n. A long and demanding mission, such as the journey from infancy to propriety or from the cradle to a vase.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Digestion
DIGESTION, n. The conversion of victuals into virtues. When the process is imperfect, vices are evolved instead-a circumstance from which that wicked writer, Dr. Jeremiah Blenn, infers that ladies are the greater sufferers from dyspepsia. This brutal judgement is found in his pamphlet entitled Why Are Women Sickly (John Camden Hotten: London, 1870), a work that has elicited well-merited execration in seventy languages.
"Why are all our women sickly?"Asks the famous Dr. Blenn.That is answered very quickly,-Our physicians all are men.
There is not in this wide world a pleasure so sweet as the vindication of lovely woman against unjust aspersion.
2009 Update: A contest between a dead and a living animal, resolved inevitably in favor of the vegetable.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Depilatory
DEPILATORY, adj. Having the property of removing hair from the skin-a quality highly developed in the hand of a wife.
2009 Update: Apeciogenic. Causing the removal or absence of especially bodily hair, such as by the presence of ambition in the blood or estrogen in the home.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
The Reformation of Wolfshausen
Friday, October 23, 2009
Homicide
HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another — the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.
2009 Update: Inverted nostalgia. Philosophy from the seed.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Heat
HEAT, n.
Heat, says Professor Tyndall, is a mode2009 Update: The condition poets will call inspiring, construction crews perspiring, joggers respirational, surfers recreational, the sleepy soporific, and the chef prolific; as measured by a thermometer.
Of motion, but I know now how he's proving
His point; but this I know — hot words bestowed
With skill will set the human fist a-moving,
And where it stops the stars burn free and wild.
Crede expertum — I have seen them, child.
—Gorton Swope
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The Snail's Secret Secondary Source
A weasel, down a forest trail,
Trotted past a lonesome snail,
"Whither thou?" the weasel asked
"To Rome, Modesto or Damascus?"
"I keep an atlas in my shell,"
The snail replied after a spell
"And every place I roam and wander,
Is annotated 'just up yonder.'"
"And does it tell, by signs or words,
The whereabouts of nesting birds?"
"No, let me make the caption clear
Each page announces 'leaves be here'."
"What waste of good cartography
To omit the sites that interest me!"
"My map of foliage, I find fine,
And copied once upon a vine."
The weasel darted on ahead,
To see where the forest trail led
While the snail, of his terrain assured,
Sauntered right up to a waiting bird.
ROADMAP, n. The landscape of the lost.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Hypocrite
HYPOCRITE, n. One who, professing virtues that he does not respect, secures the advantage of seeming to be what he despises.
2009 Update: A man alleging hypocrisy.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Horrid
HORRID, adj. In English hideous, frightful, appalling. In Young-womanese, mildly objectionable.
2009 Update: Punishable by exclamation.There was a pretty girl.In the terror and the whirl
Of the tempest of her passion she was torrid!
But when moderately moved
By what she disapproved
She said, with gentle censure, it was horrid.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Free-Will
FREE-WILL, n.
A chip, in floating down a stream,Indulged a gratifying dream:"All things on earth but only IAre bound by stern necessity-"Are moved this way or that, their courseDetermined by some outer force."The helpless boughs upon the treesConfess the suasion of the breeze."The stone where it was placed remainsTill loosened by the frost or rains."The animals go here and thereAs circumstances may declare."The influence they cannot seeIs clearly visible to me."Yet all belive they're governed stillBy nothing but their solemn will."Deluded fools! I-I aloneObey no forces but my own."Without or sail or oar, I glideAt pleasure to the ocean's tide."No pow'r shall stay me till I laveMy body in the salt sea wave.Just then an eddy's gentle strengthBy hardly half a finger's length,His chipship drew aside. Said he;"'Tis far indeed to reach the sea."Now more and more, behold him swerveAlong the eddy's outer curve.He says: "My joy in swimming's o'erI'm half inclined to go ashore."As still he sweeps his arc,He adds: "The day is growing dark,"But still there's time to reach, no doubt,The point for which I first set out."The circle was completed quite."Right here," he said. "I'll pass the night."Nor ever once that chip suspectedThat ought but he his course deflected.Free-will, O mortals, is a dream:Ye all are ships upon a stream.
2009 Update: The iron shackling each to his or her own failures, felonies and follies.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Fear
FEAR, n. A sense of the total depravity of the immediate future.
He either fears his fate too much,2009 Update: Panic at the mundane or its variations.
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch-
Who'd rather pass than call.
Earl of Montrose
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The Tragedy of The Commons Explained
An open meadow, green and thick
Makes every shepherd wild
To gather his whole wooly flock
And graze the free land mild.
But where one herdsman tarries
The land will soon be full
Of other shepherds gathered
To deplore the price of wool.
And soon they bring their flocks and kin
To reap each blade, leaf, root and feather
And gather up to drink rum
And to predict the weather.
And once the lea has been stripped bare
And no-one's left for thanking,
The flock is left to starve or
Follow graziers into banking.
Cultivated from these roots:
Too many open ovine mouths
Near surplus farmers' boots.
-Anatole Idyll
COMMONS, n. A pastoral resource held collectively in trust by the parents of malthusian libertarians.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Fidelity
FIDELITY, n. A virtue particular to those who are about to be betrayed.
2009 Update: A portable promise of permanence. The peanut butter on the trap's trigger.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Forma Pauperis
FORMA PAUPERIS. [Latin] In the character of a poor person — a method by which a litigant without money for lawyers is considerately permitted to lose his case.
When Adam long ago in Cupid's awful court
(For Cupid ruled ere Adam was invented)
Sued for Eve's favor, says an ancient law report,
He stood and pleaded unhabilimented.
"You sue in forma pauperis, I see," Eve cried;
"Actions can't here be that way prosecuted."
So all poor Adam's motions coldly were denied:
He went away — as he had come — nonsuited.
—G.J.
2009 Update: A certification that one party's destitution prevents them from addressing the court in a living language. However the case shall be decided, the world and fortune have been held liable.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
The Reformation of Wolfshausen
Friday, October 09, 2009
Wedding
WEDDING, n. A ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one, one undertakes to become nothing, and nothing undertakes to become supportable.
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Woman
WOMAN, n. An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. It is credited by many of the elder zoologists with a certain vestigial docility acquired in a former state of seclusion, but naturalists of the postsusananthony period, having no knowledge of the seclusion, deny the virtue and declare that such as creation's dawn beheld, it roareth now. The species is the most widely distributed of all beasts of prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe, from Greeland's spicy mountains to India's moral strand. The popular name (wolfman) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movement, especially the American variety (Felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be taught not to talk.
—Balthasar Pober2009 Update: The constructively gendered portion of the adult human population for whose sake every secret is hidden and all humor diluted. In traditional societies, woman is commonly the nurturer of children while in contemporary civilization she is more often mother to hyphens, commas and quotations.
Um. I might be offline a lot today. Just sayin'.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
A Fable
Once, in ancient times, two monks were walking together in the trailless Egyptian desert. As they climbed over a rise, they saw below them a vixen steal an egg from a bird's nest and scamper away into her own den, the entrance to which was in plain view.
Abba Nelson, the younger of the two monks asked his superior, "What are we to do? The egg to the bird represents her next generation, but what if this is the fox's only way to feed her young? As Christians, should we intervene to perhaps save the chick or ignore the theft and perhaps save the kits?"
"If the kits grow up will they yowl Jesus' name to sinners?" asked Abba Abercrombie, the older monk.
"Not in our language, surely, but who can tell? We do not know how God will use us."
"And if the egg should hatch, will the new dove be seen in foreign parts as a herald of the Holy Spirit?"
"If strangers don't know of the Holy Spirit, they won't receive it from the dove, I wouldn't think. But who knows how God chooses his agents?"
"Quite right," applauded Abba Abercrombie, "but we can guess that if God meant to stop a crime, he wouldn't send an old monk and a philosophical one to the scene."
INTERCEDE, v.t. To interfere in the natural order according to the creator's instruction.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
War
WAR, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself inaccessible to the light. "In time of peace prepare for war" has a deeper meaning than is commonly discerned; it means, not merely that all things earthly have an end — that change is the one immutable and eternal law — but that the soil of peace is thickly sown with the seeds of war and singularly suited to their germination and growth. It was when Kubla Khan had decreed his "stately pleasure dome" — when, that is to say, there were peace and fat feasting in Xanadu — that he
heard from afarAncestral voices prophesying war.
One of the greatest of poets, Coleridge was one of the wisest of men, and it was not for nothing that he read us this parable. Let us have a little less of "hands across the sea," and a little more of that elemental distrust that is the security of nations. War loves to come like a thief in the night; professions of eternal amity provide the night.
2009 Update: The contest by which two or more governments seek to extend national sovereignty into the provinces.
Feliz compleaƱos, Papi Brujo
Monday, October 05, 2009
Worship
WORSHIP, n. Homo Creator's testimony to the sound construction and fine finish of Deus Creatus. A popular form of abjection, having an element of pride.
2009 Update: Ritual wonder at GOD's great grace and the petty apostasies of the fellowship committee.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
The Reformation of Wolfshausen
Friday, October 02, 2009
Brain
BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think what we think. That which distinguishes the man who is content to be something from the man who wishes to do something. A man of great wealth, or one who has been pitchforked into high station, has commonly such a headful of brain that his neighbors cannot keep their hats on. In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, brain is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
2009 Update: An organ ingeniously, though mindlessly, devised by nature to absorb the force of impact against the cranium from, for example, walls, trees or incited violence. Nature's styrofoam peanut.
Without a soft, spongy, compressible brain to fill the interior, injuries such as the one depicted (right) would pose a much greater threat to the integrity of the skull.
Happy birthday, to my brother, Andy. (Be assured, today's word selection is purely coincidental)
Happy birthday, also, to Nessa.
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Brain
BRAIN, v.t. To rebuke bluntly, but not pointedly; to dispel a source of error in an opponent.
2009 Update: To misdirect a rebuttal, well on the high side.
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