The Roycroft Dictionary Part 11

THOUGHT: 1. Something made up of the thoughts you, yourself, think. The other kind is supplied to you by jobbers. 2. Mental dynamite.

TIME: 1. The press-agent of genius. 2. An eternal guest that banquets on our ideals and bodies. 3. In the theater of the G.o.ds a moving-picture film that reproduces the cosmic comedy. 4. A metaphysical ent.i.ty that made the Ingersoll watch a physical possibility. 5. A loafer playing at tenpins. 6. An illusion--to orators. 7. The solvent and the dissolver of all. (Time was anciently symbolized by Kronos; today it is symbolized by the mystical syllables, So-Much-Per. The word has also undergone strange etymological changes. Anciently, time was singular, but since the advent of the Unions, we have "time and a third," "double time," etc.)

TOMB: A place for the deposit of the dead. (See College, Newspaper Office, Philadelphia Club, Legation, etc.)

TOP-NOTCHER: An individual who works only for the interest of the inst.i.tution of which he is a part, not against it.

TOTAL DEPRAVITY: The greatest idea for the acquisition of power and pelf ever devised.

TROUBLE: 1. A hallucination that affords a sweet satisfaction to the possessor. 2. Any interesting topic of conversation. 3. A plan of Nature whereby a person is diverted from the humiliation of seeing himself as others see him. (An impressario's troubles begin when the prima donna kicks and the ladies of the ballet won't.)

TRUMPET: A musical instrument which in the mouth of Gabriel will bring to life for their eternal undoing all Shylocks, officeholders, editorial writers, landlords, and professional epigrammatists.

t.i.tLE: 1. A Pantheon of royal ciphers. 2. Anything superimposed on a superfluity.

TRUTH: 1. A universal error. 2. A relation between one illusion (the outer world) and another (the inner world). 3. A prejudice raised to an axiom. 4. Something that a few will die for. 5. That which serves us best in expressing our lives. (A rotting log is truth to a bed of violets; while sand is truth to a cactus.) 6. Anything which happened, might have happened, or which will possibly happen. 7. The opinion that still survives. 8. An imaginary line dividing error into two parts.

TRADITION: 1. Salvation through ossification; redemption through folklore; a fetter for the foolish. 2. A clock that tells what time it was. 3. A method of holding the many back while some man does the thing which they declare is impossible.

UNIVERSITY: 1. An inst.i.tution for the prevention of learning. 2. A place where rich men send their sons who have no apt.i.tude for business. 3. A plan for the elimination of physical culture and the exaltation of athletics. 4. A literary, gonococci culture-bed. 5. A collection of buildings which emit the odor of the cla.s.sics and omit the odor of sanct.i.ty. 6. A place wherein the youthful mind is taught the danger of thinking.

UNION LABOR: A force which unchecked would develop into violent and destructive anarchy.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Miss District de Columbia and her forty-eight Subsidiaries.

UNREQUITED: (Used generally with the word love.) Inability to make both ends meet.

UTOPIAN: A person who demands that you shall live up to his ideals.

UNPARDONABLE SIN: Neglecting to close the screen-door.

UP TO DATE: To be far behind the Ancients, who were generally ahead of the current date. _E. g._, "This thing would never have happened if I had only been up to date, but I tried to be dateless."--Last words of Socrates.

UTOPIA: A place where you have but to suggest a thing, to consider it done; a condition where all things are supplied on slipping a wish into a slot.

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 seash.o.r.e.

VIVISECTION: Blood-l.u.s.t, 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 compet.i.tor 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 friends.h.i.+p.

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 G.o.d to circ.u.mvent the Devil.

WORMS: 1. The final word in criticism. 2. At the last a.n.a.lysis.

WORRY: Ironic nurse to old bedridden Dame Care. _E. g._, "I should worry"--famous saying of the Infinite Nix at twelve o'clock Sat.u.r.day night of the Sixth Day as he threw down his tools and sent the Earth about its business.