The Roycroft Dictionary Part 4

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.

FORt.i.tUDE: 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 t.i.tus 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_.

FRIENDs.h.i.+P: 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 s.e.x, 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."

G.o.d: 1. The John Doe of philosophy and religion. 2. The first atheist.

3. A puzzle-editor.

G.o.d AND SATAN: The Pathe Freres of existence.

G.o.dDESS: 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 n.i.g.g.ardly 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.

GRAt.i.tUDE: A lively sense of antic.i.p.ation 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 pediculidae.

HEAVEN: 1. The Coney Island of the Christian imagination. 2. Largely a matter of digestion. 3. An orphan asylum where inst.i.tutionalism reigns.

4. A penitential colony where the virtuous and the good are condemned to eternal fellows.h.i.+p 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.

h.e.l.l: 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 h.e.l.l gracefully and taken a record for descent."--From Lucifer's _Confessions of a Ticket-o'-Leave Man_.