The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce [spicy books to read .TXT] 📗

as, “the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur.” Hope

Desire and expectation rolled into one.

Delicious Hope! when naught to man is left⁠—
Of fortune destitute, of friends bereft;
When even his dog deserts him, and his goat
With tranquil disaffection chews his coat
While yet it hangs upon his back; then thou,
The star far-flaming on thine angel brow,
Descendest, radiant, from the skies to hint
The promise of a clerkship in the Mint.

—⁠Fogarty Weffing Hospitality

The virtue which induces us to feed and lodge certain persons who are not in need of food and lodging.

Hostility

A peculiarly sharp and specially applied sense of the earth’s overpopulation. Hostility is classified as active and passive; as (respectively) the feeling of a woman for her female friends, and that which she entertains for all the rest of her sex.

Houri

A comely female inhabiting the Muslim Paradise to make things cheery for the good Muslim, whose belief in her existence marks a noble discontent with his earthly spouse, whom he denies a soul. By that good lady the Houris are said to be held in deficient esteem.

House

A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus and microbe.

House of Correction

A place of reward for political and personal service, and for the detention of offenders and appropriations.

House of God

A building with a steeple and a mortgage on it.

House-dog

A pestilent beast kept on domestic premises to insult persons passing by and appal the hardy visitor.

Housemaid

A youngerly person of the opposing sex employed to be variously disagreeable and ingeniously unclean in the station in which it has pleased God to place her.

Houseless

Having paid all taxes on household goods.

Hovel

The fruit of a flower called the Palace.

Twaddle had a hovel,
Twiddle had a palace;
Twaddle said: “I’ll grovel
Or he’ll think I bear him malice”⁠—
A sentiment as novel
As a castor on a chalice.

Down upon the middle
Of his legs fell Twaddle
And astonished Mr. Twiddle,
Who began to lift his noddle,
Feed upon the fiddle⁠—
Faddle flummery, unswaddle
A newborn self-sufficiency and think himself a model.

—⁠G. J. Humanity

The human race, collectively, exclusive of the anthropoid poets.

Humorist

A plague that would have softened down the hoar austerity of Pharaoh’s heart and persuaded him to dismiss Israel with his best wishes, cat-quick.

Lo! the poor humorist, whose tortured mind
Sees jokes in crowds, though still to gloom inclined⁠—
Whose simple appetite, untaught to stray,
His brains, renewed by night, consumes by day.
He thinks, admitted to an equal sty,
A graceful hog would bear his company.

—⁠Alexander Poke Hurricane

An atmospheric demonstration once very common but now generally abandoned for the tornado and cyclone. The hurricane is still in popular use in the West Indies and is preferred by certain old-fashioned sea-captains. It is also used in the construction of the upper decks of steamboats, but generally speaking, the hurricane’s usefulness has outlasted it.

Hurry

The dispatch of bunglers.

Husband

One who, having dined, is charged with the care of the plate.

Hybrid

A pooled issue.

Hydra

A kind of animal that the ancients catalogued under many heads.

Hyena

A beast held in reverence by some oriental nations from its habit of frequenting at night the burial-places of the dead. But the medical student does that.

Hypochondriasis

Depression of one’s own spirits.

Some heaps of trash upon a vacant lot
Where long the village rubbish had been shot
Displayed a sign among the stuff and stumps⁠—
“Hypochondriasis.” It meant The Dumps.

—⁠Bogul S. Purvy Hypocrite

One who, professing virtues that he does not respect, secures the advantage of seeming to be what he despises.

I

I is the first letter of the alphabet, the first word of the language, the first thought of the mind, the first object of affection. In grammar it is a pronoun of the first person and singular number. Its plural is said to be We, but how there can be more than one myself is doubtless clearer to the grammarians than it is to the author of this incomparable dictionary. Conception of two myselves is difficult, but fine. The frank yet graceful use of “I” distinguishes a good writer from a bad; the latter carries it with the manner of a thief trying to cloak his loot.

Ichor

A fluid that serves the gods and goddesses in place of blood.

Fair Venus, speared by Diomed,
Restrained the raging chief and said:
“Behold, rash mortal, whom you’ve bled⁠—
Your soul’s stained white with ichorshed!”

—⁠Mary Doke Iconoclast

A breaker of idols, the worshipers whereof are imperfectly gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest that he unbuildeth but doth not reedify, that he pulleth down but pileth not up. For the poor things would have other idols in place of those he thwacketh upon the mazzard and dispelleth. But the iconoclast saith: “Ye shall have none at all, for ye need them not; and if the rebuilder fooleth round hereabout, behold I will depress the head of him and sit thereon till he squawk it.”

Idiot

A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but “pervades and regulates the whole.” He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a deadline.

Idleness

A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.

Ignoramus

A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.

Dumble was an ignoramus,
Mumble was for learning famous.
Mumble said one day to Dumble:
“Ignorance should be more humble.
Not a spark have you of knowledge
That was got in any college.”
Dumble said to Mumble: “Truly
You’re self-satisfied unduly.
Of things in college I’m denied
A knowledge⁠—you of all beside.”

—⁠Borelli Illuminati

A sect of Spanish heretics of the latter part of the sixteenth century; so called because they were light weights⁠—cunctationes illuminati.

Illustrious

Suitably placed for the shafts of malice, envy and