Mercy: 1. The charity of tyrants. 2. The forgiveness of one scoundrel by another. 3. The culmination of the Will-to-Power and its final apotheosis. 4. A quality which, like soup, the more it is strained the less soup and the more water you have. 5. In war a universal mode of subjugating a people.

Mephisto: The fourth person in the Holy Trinity.

Militancy: A fixed, fighting mental attitude that will never know when the war is over.

Midnight: 1. The Pole of the hours; a pincushion on which sparkle all the seconds of a day; the keel of the good ship Tomorrow. 2. A chimney whence the dreams of today issue in smoke.

Metaphysics: 1. An attempt to define a thing and by so doing escape the bother of understanding it. 2. The explanation of a thing by a person who does not understand it.

Middleman: One who works both ends against the middle.

Millennium: 1. A thousand years beginning with Now and ending with Then. 2. A mythical period when every one will pay his debts and begin tomorrow again on renewed credit. 3. A religious cycle which has no visible means of support, even admitting the ideality of time. Hence, by extension and usage – [Here insert a Mergenthaler pi line of thirty-two ems.]

Mammon: The Pope of Protestantism.

Muckraker: One who sits on the fence and defames American enterprise as it marches by.

Miracle: 1. A happening seen by four men at once, but by no one man in particular – hence, a collective, but otherwise untrue, fact. 2. The minutiæ of cosmologies. 3. A physical event described by those to whom it was related by men who did not see it. 4. A portent that precedes the coming of a Liar with letters patent from Nowhere, or a series of extraordinary occurrences that attend his comings and goings and mouthings that in no way equal in majesty, beauty or mystery the simplest commonplace of his life. (No god, demigod, or other parasite of human ignorance is complete without miracles, for it is only the natural and commonplace that are unbelievable.)

Motherhood: The headliner in God's great vaudeville.

Missionaries: Sincere, self-deceived persons suffering from meddler's itch.

Mistress: 1. A female who has rights, as distinguished from a married woman, who has duties. 2. One whose respect and love some married men may hold without the non-transferable license in the bottom of a trunk.

Martyrdom: The sweet apotheosis of the things we do not care to avoid.

Minute: 1. The crutch on which the Hour leans as it limps into Eternity. 2. A space of time in which we dream of something that will never come true, or form a resolution that another minute effaces.

Modesty: 1. A beau-catcher that young ladies wear and women affect. 2. In a sweetmeat, the souffle through which we dig to reach the plums. 3. The blush on the face of Desire at the consciousness of its own immodesty. 4. Among men modesty is the will-to-wait and seize. 5. Venom, who sidles into corners and shuns the limelight, so that he may the better see. 6. The attitude of mind that precedes the pounce. 7. The subtlest symptom of paranoia. 8. Egotism turned wrong side out.

Mummy: 1. An unobjectionable party whose motives are not questioned. 2. One who is not in business for his health. 3. Any one who does not advertise.

Morality: 1. The formaldehyde of theology. 2. The line of conduct that pays.

Moralist: 1. A beautified eunuch. 2. One self-elected to make the stupid more stupid. 3. Any one skilled in the science of pornography. 4. A retired roue. 5. One of the Sacred Legion of Coprolitis.

Morgue: The pantheon of the unremembered; Death's shop-window.

Munsey: 1. Any publisher who does much business on small mental capital. 2. Verb: To munsey – to print much and say nothing. 3. A literary laxative. 4. To put up money for a monkey monarchy.

Murderer: 1. A savior of society. Synonyms: Soldier, hangman, doctor. 2. A man born ahead of or after his time.

Music: 1. Anything that has charms to soothe a savage beast. 2. Unnecessary noises heard in restaurants and cheap hotels. 3. The only one of the arts that can not be prostituted to a base use. 4. An attempt to express the emotions that are beyond speech. 5. A noise less objectionable than any other noise.

Mystic: 1. One who guzzles his God. 2. A person who is puzzled before the obvious, but who understands the non-existent. 3. To stand over the vasty deep to summon monsters and slip in. 4. Sap that has lost its way. 5. A gymnast who turns flip-flops between the Here and the Not-Here. (Plato was the first mystic. It was he who announced the discovery of the Non-Existent. Hegel was the last mystic, for it was he who proved the Non-Existent was and was not, might have been and never could be, has was, is now, and never shall be.)

NATURE: 1. The Unseen Intelligence which loved us into being, and is disposing of us by the same token. 2. That which every one but a theologian understands, but which no one can define. 3. The Louvre of the Esthetic Eye; the abattoir of the Religious Eye; the charivari of the Ironic Eye. 4. The eternal Kishineff of an implacable God.

Nancy: A person of neither sex, who yet combines the bad qualities of both.

Nigger: A colored person who has no money.

New Thought: Plain, simple commonsense.

Newspaper Office: A figment factory.

Nietzsche (Friedrich): A thunder smith.

Nebulous Typothetæ: A bum printer who can never be found when wanted.

Neighbor: The man who knows more about you than you know about yourself.

Nothing: 1. A negative which is the reality behind every ghostly affirmative. 2. Something that has density without weight, like a barber's breath.

Nomination: 1. Paradigrammatics, or the art of molding figures in plaster. 2. The call of the vile. 3. In democracies, the divine sacrament administered to ignorance. 3. The election, divination and apotheosis of a paramount parasite.

New York: The posthumous revenge of the Merchant of Venice.

Nesbit: A plenipotentiary of publicity who takes pretty nothings and makes of them New York Central literary hash.

OBEDIENCE: 1. Expectation on a monument. 2. A dignified retreat from Balaklava. 3. Lex Talionis playing 'possum. 4. The second law of Nature, the first being murder. E. g., "After all, it was my brother's Obedience to the Lord that laid the foundation of my glory." – From Cain's Diary of an Altar-Wrecker.

Opportunity: 1. The only Knocker that is welcome. 2. Health and a job.

Oblivion: 1. The memory of Eternity. 2. A place where the human race and politicians are as one; where immortals are afflicted with aphasia; where God enjoys a long siesta; where we lose the bores and all those good folks who want to tell us the sad story of their lives.

Old Maid: A lady of uncertain age and uneasy virtue.

Opera: 1. Forerunner of the phonograph. 2. A rendezvous for the bored.

Optimism: 1. The instinct to lie. 2. Fatty degeneration of intelligence. 3. A philosophical system that attempts to demonstrate the existence of a pre-established Stupidity. 4. To believe that disease, dirt, earthquakes, fires, wars, politicians, blindness, and burial alive, celebrate and enhance the Glory of God. 5. To whistle while passing a cemetery in the night; to sing a hymn while having a tooth pulled; to smile while being robbed. 6. A tipple invented by Leigh Mitchell Hodges, the basis of which is clams and prune juice. 7. A kind of heart stimulant – the digitalis of failure.

Orthodoxy: 1. In religion, that state of mind which congratulates itself on being absolutely right, and a belief that all who think otherwise are wholly wrong. 2. A faith in the fixed – a worship of the static. 3. The joy that comes from thinking that most everybody is lined up for Limbus with no return ticket. 4. A condition brought about by the sprites of Humor, according to the rule that whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. 5. The zenith of selfishness and the nadir of egotism. 6. Mephisto with a lily in his hand. 7. A corpse that does not know it is dead. 8. Spiritual constipation. 9. That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea or absorb a new one.

Organized Religion: Antique philosophy, or the rule of the priest.

Obstinacy: 1. To stick to your favorite lie or truth because you know you are wrong in either case. 2. The ego's peacock-plumes.

Optimist: 1. A neurotic person with gooseflesh, and teeth a-chatter, trying hard to be brave. 2. A man who when he falls in the soup thinks of himself as being in the swim. 3. A man who does not care what happens, so long as it doesn't happen to him.

Oratory: 1. Chin-music with Prince Albert accompaniment. 2. The lullaby of the Intellect. 3. Palaver in a Prince Albert.

Orient: 1. The subconscious part of the Occident. 2. The cradle of all infamies and all wisdom. 3. A place where God and the house have an esoteric meaning.

PAIN: 1. The sacred, immanent music of the Cosmos written in slow triple time. 2. A form of salvation invented by Christianity. 3. A beautiful and ecstatic state wherein one comes to a realization of the benevolence of the Almighty.

Paradise: 1. A place where one is permitted to continue one's vices, excesses and inanities for an eternity. 2. A postmortem rake-off. 3. Any place from which one can see a friend in Hell. 4. One good telephone system. (Christians, Mohammedans and Billysundays have promised themselves a cheerful time after death; this they call Paradise. The Jews are the only people who have no Paradise beyond the tomb; this is easily explained when it is remembered that they own New York.)

Parody: A calico cat stuffed with cotton.

Parvenu: One who has risen suddenly from nothing and becomes nothing suddenly.

Peace: A monotonous interval between fights.

Pedant: A person with more education than he can use.

Performer: One who has a right to do troglodyte stunts and who can do something else.

Perfume: Any smell that is used to down a worse one.

Philosophy: Our highest conception of life, its duties and its destinies.

Politicians: 1. Men who volunteer the task of governing us for a consideration. 2. See Graftheimer.

Pericles: See Aspasia.

Pessimist: 1. One who has been intimately acquainted with an Optimist. 2. The official vinegar-taster to Setebos.

Piety: 1. The tinfoil of pretense. 2. That feeling of reverence we have toward the Almighty on account of His supposed resemblance to ourselves.

Publisher: 1. An emunctory business, first functioned by Barabbas. 2. One of a band of panders which sprang into existence soon after the death of Gutenberg and which now overruns the world. 3. The patron saint of the mediocre.

Poet: 1. A person born with the instinct to poverty. 2. One whose ideas of the beautiful and the sublime get him in jail or Potter's Field. 3. The patron saint of landlords. 4. A worthless, shiftless chap whose songs adorn the libraries of fat shopkeepers and paunchy Philistines one hundred years after the chap has died of malnutrition. 5. A dope-fiend.

Poetry: 1. A substitute for the impossible. 2. The bill and coo of sex.

Platonic Love: The only kind that is blind. It never knows where it is going to fetch up.

Planet: A planet is a large body of matter entirely surrounded by a void, as distinguished from a clergyman, who is a large void entirely surrounded by matter.

Play: A wise method of Nature which prevents one's nerves from setting on the outside of his Stein-Bloch.

Pocket: The seat of the human soul.

Police: Similia similibus.

Policy: Leaving a few things unsaid.

Politeness: 1. The screen of language; the irony of civility; a fishing-rod. 2. A substitute for war. 3. To wipe your feet carefully on the common doormat before letting yourself in another's premises with a skeleton key. 4. Caliban in a boiled shirt, tuxedo and spats. (Politeness in the animal world is known after eating only; in the human world it is known both before and after eating, and, in a certain restricted circle, during eating.)

Prayer: A supplication intended for the person who prays. Only very dull people doubt its efficacy.

Prig: A person with more money than he needs.

Preacher: 1. Mendicancy in a celluloid collar. 2. A man who advises others concerning things about which he knows nothing. 3. Any man who lives on six hundred dollars a year and only works orally. 4. (Now obsolete) One who makes pastoral calls, frightens the young, astonishes the old, bothers the busy, and serves disappointed females as vicarious lover, father, friend, and personal representative of Deity.

Practical Politics: The glad hand, and a swift kick in the pants.

Principle: 1. Bait. 2. A formula for doing a thing that, unformulated, would land the doer in jail. (Must not be confused with the word principal. Both words are used correctly in the following sentence: One may live one's life without principle, but not without principal. Or, again, Principle is sometimes principal; but principal has no principle. Or, The principal was never paid on principle.)

Prosecutor: 1. One who abets a crime after it has or has not been committed. 2. An oratorical censor that precedes the coming of the hangman. 3. A pumice-stone that gives to the Statue of Justice a cleanly, Christian look. 4. A nose that can sniff the gallows, long before the wood is cut for it in the forest.

Postponement: The father of failure.

Prison: 1. A place where any lady may have a baby without fearing society. 2. An institution where even crooks go wrong. 3. The House of a Thousand Tears. 4. The last resort of the obscure to achieve fame. 5. A banker's mess-hall. 6. A place where men go to take the vow of chastity, poverty and obedience. 7. An example of a Socialist's Paradise, where equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is eliminated.

Protestantism: 1. A splinter from the cross of Christ. 2. Acrobatic theologic mugwumpery. 3. Any one of fifty-seven varieties of hate. 4. Sects which have taken the petticoats off of the saints and put them on their pastors.

Progress: Getting free from theology, and substituting psychology instead.

Progressive: 1. A politician who wears his opinions pompadour. 2. An obstructionist who grows fat on conservatism and conversation. 3. A reactionary to whom movement and motion are necessary in order to keep warm, and secure gulps and guzzles. 4. A hungry or unsuccessful person; hence, an explosive, quixotic fellow with empty pockets and a shallow pate. 5. One who has felt the slings and arrows of outrageous success that has come to others. 6. A political piker, who will not play the game according to the rules which he himself devised. 7. One who would recall all decisions that do not uphold his claims. 8. A man who steals a label, and clapping it on himself, thinks that he is It. 9. A plan for going forward by backing up to mob rule. (The first Progressive of whom we know was Judas. The next was Ananias. Lazarus was a Progressive, and had he married the Queen of Sheba he would have changed places with Dives. E. g., "This age belongs to the Progressives." – From Kazook's Confessions of a Popular Lick-Spittle.)

Purgatory: Two telephone systems in one town.

Prosperity: 1. That peculiar condition which excites the lively interest of the ambulance-chaser. 2. That which comes about when men believe in other men. 3. That condition which attracts the lively interest of lawyers, and warrants your being sued for damages or indicted, or both.

Polygamy: An endeavor to get more out of life than there is in it.

Psychology: The science of human minds and their relationship one to another.

Public Opinion: The judgment of the incapable many opposed to that of the discerning few.

Punishment: 1. The justice that the guilty deal out to those who are caught. 2. A perpetual fine, imposed hourly during the lifetime of a human being for his temerity in living, and continued in Heaven or Hell for his temerity in dying. 3. Among the poor and lowly, a service due the State for disobeying the mandates of the rich and powerful; among the rich, a slight reaction from overeating. (There are three kinds of punishment: the punishment of God, the punishment of man, and the punishment of living in Buffalo.)

Popularity: The triumph of the commonplace.

Prophets: The advance couriers of Time.

Purity: 1. A rapt, interested and ecstatic aloofness toward natural processes. 2. A sewerage system that carries off everything, leaving the soul perfectly bald. 3. A condition of the mind that causes one to snoop around in garbage-dumps and start a league. 4. A plan of teaching things to children in which they are not interested. 5. An ethereal nose giving the miraculous power of sensing the lavatory in the Elysian Fields before it smells the flowers. (There is purity of mind, purity of body and purity of speech. Any one person endowed with all three of these modes or purity is blessed, elect, saved, or otherwise atrophied and pickled.)

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

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