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

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.)

Creed: A metaphor with ankylosis – a figure of speech frozen stiff with fright.

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.

Critics: Men who quarrel over the motive of a book that never had any.

Criminal: One who does by illegal means what all the rest of us do legally.

Cromwell (Oliver): The father of Nell Gwynn.

Credit: The lifeblood of commerce.

Caste: A Chinese Wall that deprives you of the society of sensible people.

Cain: The first progressive.

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.

Death: 1. To stop sinning suddenly. 2. To resign one's membership in the Ananias Club. 3. A readjustment of life's forces.

Debt: 1. A rope to your foot, cockleburs in your hair, and a clothespin on your tongue. 2. The devil in disguise.

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.

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.)

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.

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.)

Dennis: The man who expresses the things he thinks other folks think he thinks.

Dollar: A disk of metal which has eucharistic qualities; a sacred, miraculous object, contact with which is looked upon as curative and prophylactic.

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.

Diplomacy: An endeavor to side-step Nemesis.

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.)

Dignity: 1. A state of spiritual, mental or emotional starchiness that precedes a bluff. 2. A sartorial and tonsorial chef-d'œuvre. 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.)

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.

Discord: A guinea-hen, a peacock and a bluejay singing a trio.

Disadvantage: Having too many advantages in life.

Devil: A god who has been bounced for conduct unbecoming a gentleman.

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.

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.

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.

Duty: A pleasure which we try to make ourselves believe is a hardship.

Divorce: 1. A legal separation of two persons of the opposite sex who desire to respect and honor each other. 2. A marital derail.

Divorcee: 1. A female fugitive from injustice. 2. Any lady who is a Post-Graduate in Love's Correspondence-School.

Discontent: 1. Inertia on a strike. 2. The mainspring of progress. 3. The starting-point in every man's career.

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.

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.

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.

Duchess: The feminine of Dutchman.

Dynamo: Any man who has everything he eats, drinks, smokes and wears, charged.

EARTH 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.

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.

Education: A form of self-delusion by those who muff every good wheeze.

Economics: The science of the production, distribution and use of wealth, best understood by college professors on half-rations.

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.

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.

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.

Ennui: 1. The fourth dimension of action. 2. The looking-glass of the Infinite. 3. A state of time wherein seconds become days and hours become years. 4. A shop that contains nothing but a silent salesman, Death.

Epigram: 1. A vividly expressed truth that is so, or not, as the case may be. 2. A dash of wit and a jigger of wisdom, flavored with surprise.

Enthusiasm: The great hill-climber.

Equitable: An ironical term meaning you can fool some of the people all the time.

Equity: Simply a matter of the length of the judge's ears.

Eucharist: Salvation by the pound, or by the pint. (If one should eat, say, a pound of eucharistic chips and drink two quarts of the holy water a day, one would be cleansed of all sin and be much richer in bacteria.)

Eternity: 1. The Sunday of Time. 2. The sublimest thought of the brain of Ignorance. 3. A symphony written by a Beethoven of the ineffable x dimension. 4. The North Pole of the hours. 5. Monstrance of the Holy O. 6. A corrosive acid that obliterates Before and Afterward.

Emancipated Man: One who has dared to think for himself, and thus has added to his list of enemies.

Evolution: 1. A word that has reclassified in an entertaining manner our impermeable and eternal ignorance. 2. The growth of a thing from the simple to the complex, and the wasting away of the complex until it is simpler than ever. 3. The one superstition that is cordially hated by theologues.

Everybody: 1. The square root of zero. 2. The leavings of individuality. 3. An agglomeration of bipeds who subsist on one another's shanks. 4. The Seventh Heaven of stupidity. 5. The cosmos of the pinhead. 6. Nobody in toto. 7. The collective and organized wisdom of the lowest forms of animal intelligence.

Expectancy: An exciting interval between rounds.

Expectation: 1. An optimistic feeling about an event that will never occur. 2. The secret of the persecution of the Jews, Christians and Mohammedans by one another. 3. The Goddess of Love. Synonyms: Tomorrow, next week, next year, next century, pretty soon – any imaginary space of time after the present moment.

Existence: 1. A metaphysical term which originally meant joy, but which since the beginning of the Christian era has come to mean pain. 2. To be (used only in the phrase "to be damned"). 3. Merely to live, without eating or drinking. (In London, Paris and New York, this phenomenon is quite common.)

Experience: 1. The germ of power. 2. The name every one gives his mistakes. 3. Stinging and getting stung.

Expression: 1. That mode of creation by which we coin things out of our hearts. (Nothing is of any value except that which you create for yourself, and no joy is joy save as it is the joy of self-expression.) 2. Mind speaking through its highest instrument, Man.

Eye: 1. An organ of the human body which sees the universe as it is not, and transmits the same to the brain. 2. The soul's feelers and pickers.

Eyeball: 1. A small, miraculous globe that has the power to fabulize the external universe. 2. The spectacles of the brain; the peephole of consciousness.

Epitaph: 1. Postponed compliments. 2. Postmortem bull-con. 3. Qualifying for the Ananias Club.

European: An inhabitant of New York City.

Executive: A man who can make quick decisions and is sometimes right.

FARMER: 1. A man who raises early feed for potato-bugs. 2. One who supplies raw stock for vaudeville jokes. 3. A man who makes his money in the country and blows it in when he comes to town. (Farms were first devised as an excuse for the Agricultural Department at Washington.)

Failure: 1. The man who can tell others what to do and how to do it, but never does it himself. 2. A man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

Fashion: A barricade behind which men hide their nothingness.

Fame: To have your name paged by the "buttons" of a fashionable hotel.

Faith: 1. The effort to believe that which your commonsense tells you is not true. 2. The first requisite in success.

Fake: An event that occurs every four years in the United States; hence, by extension, anything popular.

Family Line: The clothes-line.

Fast Train: One that has no diner.

Fear: 1. A club used by priests, presidents, kings and policemen to keep the people from recovering stolen goods. 2. The thought of admitted inferiority. 3. The rock on which we split.

Feathers: Secondary sex advertisements made of fiber and horsetails, and used on ladies' lids as eye-gougers and such.

Feud: A fool idea fanned into flame by a fool friend.

Feminist Movement: 1. A hot desire to step on the male tumble-bug. 2. An uneasy, eccentric, patho-psychio gyration, caused by disappointment or thwarted ambition. 3. A loose cam or a cosmic monkeywrench in the convolutions.

Fifth Avenue: 1. The widow's chance. 2. A rabbit-warren. 3. The underworld of the upper world. (Fifth Avenue begins at the Washington Arch and really ends at Fifty-ninth Street. Above Fifty-ninth Street one goes into the sacred precincts of monasteries and nunneries. In this district the inhabitants are divided into two classes: those who barely live and those who live barely.)

Fly: A sententious, epigrammatic stylist who puts a period after each utterance.

Folderol: Talk or conversation of any kind between a man and a woman that does not contain an invitation or a promise.

Forbearance: 1. To forgive an enemy who has been shorn of power. 2. To buy golden opinions of one's self. 3. To slay with irony or pity.

Forecast: To observe that which has passed, and guess it will happen again; to anticipate the future by guessing at the past; to predict that an event will happen, if it does, by basing calculations on events that have already happened, if they did. (One may forecast and be right, wrong, or neither. It depends.)

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.

Fortitude: 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 Titus 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.

Friendship: 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 sex, 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."

God: 1. The John Doe of philosophy and religion. 2. The first atheist. 3. A puzzle-editor.

God and Satan: The Pathe Freres of existence.

Goddess: 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 niggardly 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.