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

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.

Gratitude: A lively sense of anticipation 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 pediculidæ.

Heaven: 1. The Coney Island of the Christian imagination. 2. Largely a matter of digestion. 3. An orphan asylum where institutionalism reigns. 4. A penitential colony where the virtuous and the good are condemned to eternal fellowship 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.

Hell: 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 hell gracefully and taken a record for descent." – From Lucifer's Confessions of a Ticket-o'-Leave Man.

Husband: A booby prize in life's lottery.

Helta-Skelta: The new substitute for Strenuosity. Puts you to sleep while you work. Helta-Skelta is a prepossessing product made from posthole polyglot piecrust, and is warranted free from teddine, swaboda, korona, kabo and karezza. Served face to face with cream or without, it is spit out as soon as chewed, and can not be swallowed. Locate the lavatory and try a free sample.

Hen: The only animal in Nature that can lay around and make money.

Highbrow: 1. A person who has grown so wise that the obvious escapes him. 2. One who reveres knowledge with superstitious awe, and whose worship of observation approaches the ecstatic. 3. One who believes that an atom is a monstrance that conceals the Holy Ghost of Force.

Highflyer: Any man who rides on the running-board, when he might just as well be inside the limousine.

History: 1. A collection of epitaphs. 2. Gossip well told.

Home: 1. A place where we go to change our clothes so as to go somewhere else. 2. The abode of the heart.

Humor: The tabasco sauce that gives life a flavor.

Humility: 1. The slippered patience of the disinherited. 2. The grogginess of the Ego. 3. To recede to the very bottom of one's own littleness. 4. The Marseillaise of the disappointed. 5. The odor of sanctity. 6. An Iago in plush and lavender. 7. Pride getting ready for a Pounce.

Honeymoon: 1. A happiness not quite worn out. 2. A postlude to a wedding-march and a prelude to a funeral ditto. E. g., "I did not drive Adam and Eve out of Eden because they ate my pet pippin, but because they insisted on carrying on their honeymoon before the modest animals." – From The Private Journal of Démiurge.

Hope: 1. A substitute for yesterday. 2. A mask that dying persons wear. 3. A system of metaphysics founded by Ananias. Antonyms: Reason, imagination, experience.

House: 1. A building with four walls and a roof. 2. A rendezvous for burglars. 3. A dormitory for servants. 4. The Mecca of bedbugs. (The difference between a house and a home is this: A house may fall down, but a home is broken up.)

Human Love: The one indestructible thing in Nature.

Human Dynamo: Any man who gets everything charged.

IDEAL: 1. The dreams of a sin to come. 2. The mirage of failure. 3. The venom of the lost. 4. An excuse for murder, tyranny or for self-aggrandizement. 5. Any theory that justifies our secret itch.

Idealist: 1. A glassblower. 2. A somnambulist who insists on stepping out of a solid window into the air. 3. A person who lives in a tower of porcelain and dines on pumpernickel and lobscouse. 4. A man who fills his gasoline-tank with attar of roses and expects the motor to run.

Intelligence: The grand inquisitor that tortures from every truth the confession that it lies, and from every lie a confession of its divine necessity.

Ideal Life: Man's normal life, as we shall some day know it.

If: 1. A tightrope that stretches from But to But. 2. A small, magical, automatic hinge that can swing the doors of Chance in any direction. 3. A fatality endowed with free will. 4. The verbal sword of Damocles. 5. A dizzy precipice at the end of every declarative sentence. 6. A pole around which the future and the past play hide-and-seek. 7. The vorspiel to the piker's threnody. E. g. (Scene: a narrow bridge.): "Let me pass, fellow! my name is Must, and I desire to cross." If (standing in the middle of the bridge): "You damn fool, don't you see I am the end of the bridge? There is no Must nor Might that can go beyond me."

Imitation: The sincerest form of insult.

Ignoramus: Any man who flatters himself that he is educated.

Imagination: 1. A marvelous little multicolored drugget that covers the rough and splintered floor of reality. 2. A haunted chateau. 3. A vestibule between Time and Eternity. 4. The giant enemy of reality. 5. The red Pantheon of Lucifer. 6. The candle-gleam of science; the flambeau of the lover; the constellated nebulæ of the poet. 7. The glittering west-dust of a hidden innominate sun. 8. The seigniory of untrammeled instincts; the fief of unsanctified dreams; the palfrey that carries us toward nebulous spiritual hills. 9. The plasma of gods. 10. Puck strapped to the back of Balaam's ass. 11. The Shakespeare of mental faculties. 12. The avatar of the emotions. 13. A golden key that unlocks the bastile of logic. 14. A ladder to the fourth dimension. 15. A sublime liar. 16. Taking the halter off your thoughts and giving them a good kick behind. 17. Sympathy illumined by brains.

Imitator: A man who succeeds in being an imitation.

Immortality: 1. A reward given to infidels and atheists by a somewhat humorous God, for not groveling before Him and annoying Him with importunities. 2. A system of punishment for suicides, which makes suicide impossible, thereby putting one over on the ingrate who was tired of the gift of life, by compelling him to live forever, willy-nilly. 3. A valueless thing, because unlimited in quantity, which those hotly intent upon achieving will forfeit through the law which provides that that for which we clutch we lose. 4. A condition sought by political officeholders where the incumbent never either dies or resigns. 5. A state of being encouraged by annuitants, and those who live in the Garden of Allah-Money. 6. A flimflam offer by a theologian of inchoate title to improved real estate in the Sky for real estate, rentals and cash on Earth. 7. A doctrine that the rich teach the poor for good and sufficient reasons. 8. Divine Compensation for the starving. 9. A superfluous addition to life; to go on living after one desires and hopes to remain dead.

Independence: An achievement, not a bequest.

Imperialism: Tyranny, hiding behind the sacred name of Humanity.

Infidel: One who defames his Creator and impeaches his own reason by believing in Orthodox Christianity.

Infidelity: To remain faithful to one's self, and to be unfaithful to some one else's faith. In religion, to think; in the marriage institution, to fall in love; in business, to do the thing to the other fellow that the other fellow intends to do to you, and do it first.

Issue: In physiology, something that comes up and out; in politics, something that goes down and in.

Ingratitude: 1. A girl who is too busy to acknowledge receipt of a Christmas present. 2. The portion of the man who has done well; and a fight with the fox you have warmed into life is imminent.

Infusoria: The entire human race with the exception of Homer, Richard Wagner, Dante, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Rodin, Raphael, Æschylus, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer and Edward Bok, in whose tremendous skulls we live and move and have our being, like a whirlwind of germs in the vats of the Absolute.

Ingrate: Any person who has got something for nothing, and wants more on the same terms.

Initiative: Doing the right thing without being told.

Irony: The cactus-plant that sprouts over the tomb of our dead illusions.

JUDICIOUS: 1. A state of mind wherein things are weighed in an imponderable scale; a conjunction of two negatives in a void. 2. To be wanting in foolishness, character or brains. 3. An exquisite and delicate perception of the difference between two things that are exactly alike, or the total unlikeness between two things that are absolutely different. 4. An umbrella to be carried on clear days as well as on rainy ones, thus protecting the possessor from everything. 5. To lie flat on your puss while the juggernaut of Opinion goes over you; to stand perfectly still between two streetcars going in opposite directions. 6. To see what's coming and avoid it by taking all sides.

Journalist: A newspaperman out of a job.

Jury: 1. The stupidity of one brain multiplied by twelve. 2. A collection of sedentary owls. 3. The humble apology of Civilization to Savagery. E. g., "Whatever exists may be touched, but a jury is an exception to this universal law – it must be reached."

Justice: A system of revenge where the State imitates the criminal.

John Dough Proceedings: A hunt for graftheimers.

Judge: 1. A man with ankylosis of the ego, who is jealous of the stenographer for sufficient reasons. 2. One who learns law from lawyers and is excluded from the game, getting his in honors.

ING: 1. In the presence of genius, a pleb. 2. A vestige. 3. One whose chief diversion lately has been to watch himself grow beautifully less. 4. A First Cause run to seed. 5. Divine Right tempered by bombs.

Kindergarten: The greatest scheme ever devised – for the education of parents.

Knocking: A slow but sure way of putting the skids under your prospects. Push in the door softly, and all things are yours – knock and nothing shall be opened unto you.

Knowledge: The distilled essence of our intuitions, corroborated by experience. Knowledge is what I know; wisdom is what I see; theology is what I guess.

LATER: The Utopia of Postponement; a marvelous door of gold at the end of every perspective, to which Procrastination holds the keys. The Concierge of tomorrow. (Some things are done sooner, others are done now, but most things are done later; hence, manana, dreams and regrets.)

Laughter: 1. The sound you always hear when you chase your hat down the street. 2. Nature's rest-cure for tired nerves. 3. The solace of the sad. 4. A facial sunburst that is fatal to the glooms.

Law: 1. A scheme for protecting the parasite and prolonging the life of the rogue, averting the natural consequences which would otherwise come to them. 2. The crystallization of public opinion.

Lawyer: 1. A person who takes this from that, with the result that That hath not where to lay his head. 2. An unnecessary evil. 3. The only man in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

Learn: To add to one's ignorance by extending the knowledge we have of the things that we can never know.

Lie: The weapon of defense that kind Providence provides for the protection of the oppressed.

Levitation: The creeping up of your trousers when you ride horseback, so that they supply you a necktie.

Language: The tool of the mind.

Libelous: To be tactless in type.

Liar: 1. One who tells the truth about something that never happened; hence, a poet, a preacher, a politician, or an Arctic explorer. 2. An expert witness on the side of the Prosecution, or any witness called by the Defense. 3. One who reasons far ahead of his time; a seer. (As all combinations of facts must occur in endless time, the liar, no matter how absurd his statement, is uttering a truth, because he is stating a fact that has occurred or will occur at some future date. Thus, a liar, in the sense of one who utters a falsehood, can not be said, strictly speaking, to exist. As dirt is merely nectar in the process of evolving, so a liar is an observer born out of his time. He is the victim of a divine prank.)

Literature: The art of saying a thing by saying something else just as good.

Liberty: 1. A password in universal use, and hence of no value. 2. The slogan of a party or sect that seeks to enslave some other party or sect. 3. The lost latchkey to the Citadel of Power. 4. The sacred aeroplane of King Ego. 5. The right to go forth unimpeded from any place, and also to come back. 6. The Northwest Passage to Nowhere. 7. The thing Patrick Henry asked for when the bartender asked him what he would have. 8. Only a comparative term. 9. Responsibility – that is why most men dread it.

Library: A place where the dead lie.

Logic: An instrument used for bolstering a prejudice.

Loafer: The man who is usually busy keeping some one else from working.

Life: 1. An ante-mortem statement; the intrigue of force and matter; the insomnia of death; a log-jam on the stream of life. 2. The pursuit of the superfluous. 3. The cupola of a tomb. 4. A game something like Blind Man's Buff. 5. The paradise of liars. 6. A compromise between Fate and Freewill. 7. A warfare between the sexes. 8. What you choose to make it. 9. A bank-account with so much divine energy at your disposal. 10. Just one improper number after another. 11. The interval between the time your teeth are almost through and you are almost through with your teeth. 12. An affirmative between two negatives.

Lonely: A peculiar feeling caused by the presence of one or more bores.

Lovers: Unconscious comedians.

Love: The third rail for Life's Empire State Express. The beginning of all wisdom, all sympathy, all compassion, all art, all religion.

Living: A mode of wasting time from the cradle to the grave consecrated by immemorial usage.

Litigation: A form of hell whereby money is transferred from the pockets of the proletariat to that of lawyers.

MANKIND: 1. A nomadic savage that has wandered over the face of the earth from East to West in order to reach the East so it could go West again. It has left many traces of its life – barrooms, brothels, jails, churches, gallows, best sellers, etc. 2. In the animal kingdom, a surreptitious and supposititious supererogation. 3. Among the Simians a place equivalent to our hell. "Oh, you go to Mankind," is quite frequently heard in the African jungle, even in the best society.

Mahin: A jumbo of publicity who puts it over.

Mental Dissolution: That condition where you are perfectly satisfied with your religion, education and government.

Man: 1. A super-simian. 2. Holy dicebox of the devil. 3. God's scrapbook. 4. Anything allowed to stand at a public bar. 5. A biped with feathers in his or her hat. 6. A being said to be the highest work of God – and who admits it. 7. Any creature that creates a Creator in his own image. 8. A god in the crib.

Man-Hater: A woman who, finding herself no longer acceptable to man, flirts with Mephisto.

Marriage: 1. A legal or religious ceremony by which two persons of the opposite sex solemnly agree to harass and spy on each other for ninety-nine years, or until death do them join. 2. A way-station, not the end of the journey. 3. The aspiration of two vowels to be a diphthong. 4. Love's demitasse.

Mayor: 1. Particeps criminis. 2. The head and front of our offending. 3. Polonius Pecksniff, who plays Bottom for a stipend. 4. A chaste, honorable, virtuous person whose private life is made inviolable by the libel laws. 5. A prickly sensation in the back of Folly and Revelry. 6. The culmination, zenith, equator and pediment of self-sufficient mediocrity. 7. A crow's-nest from which one may see the perpetually receding horizons of the Governorship and the Presidency. 8. A chef of morality. 9. Any person afflicted with primary, secondary or tertiary holiness. 10. A palm-reader. 11. A nebulous cluster of thought-embryons resolved into a gaseous state. 12. The nosebag of public decency. 13. The alter ego of organized cant. 14. The critic of impure reason. 15. Lobster emeritus. 16. A person who takes an oath to love, honor and obey Tartuffe.