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

the populace pays those who tickle and devour it. Please

To lay the foundation for a superstructure of imposition.

Pleasure

The least hateful form of dejection.

Plebeian

An ancient Roman who in the blood of his country stained nothing but his hands. Distinguished from the Patrician, who was a saturated solution.

Plebiscite

A popular vote to ascertain the will of the sovereign.

Plenipotentiary

Having full power. A Minister Plenipotentiary is a diplomatist possessing absolute authority on condition that he never exert it.

Pleonasm

An army of words escorting a corporal of thought.

Plow

An implement that cries aloud for hands accustomed to the pen.

Plunder

To take the property of another without observing the decent and customary reticences of theft. To effect a change of ownership with the candid concomitance of a brass band. To wrest the wealth of A from B and leave C lamenting a vanished opportunity.

Pocket

The cradle of motive and the grave of conscience. In woman this organ is lacking; so she acts without motive, and her conscience, denied burial, remains ever alive, confessing the sins of others.

Poetry

A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines.

Poker

A game said to be played with cards for some purpose to this lexicographer unknown.

Police

An armed force for protection and participation.

Politeness

The most acceptable hypocrisy.

Politician

An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

Politics

A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

Polygamy

A house of atonement, or expiatory chapel, fitted with several stools of repentance, as distinguished from monogamy, which has but one.

Populist

A fossil patriot of the early agricultural period, found in the old red soapstone underlying Kansas; characterized by an uncommon spread of ear, which some naturalists contend gave him the power of flight, though Professors Morse and Whitney, pursuing independent lines of thought, have ingeniously pointed out that had he possessed it he would have gone elsewhere. In the picturesque speech of his period, some fragments of which have come down to us, he was known as “The Matter with Kansas.”

Portable

Exposed to a mutable ownership through vicissitudes of possession.

His light estate, if neither he did make it
Nor yet its former guardian forsake it,
Is portable improperty, I take it.

—⁠Worgum Slupsky Portuguese

A species of geese indigenous to Portugal. They are mostly without feathers and imperfectly edible, even when stuffed with garlic.

Positive

Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

Positivism

A philosophy that denies our knowledge of the Real and affirms our ignorance of the Apparent. Its longest exponent is Comte, its broadest Mill and its thickest Spencer.

Posterity

An appellate court which reverses the judgment of a popular author’s contemporaries, the appellant being his obscure competitor.

Potable

Suitable for drinking. Water is said to be potable; indeed, some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find it palatable only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as thirst, for which it is a medicine. Upon nothing has so great and diligent ingenuity been brought to bear in all ages and in all countries, except the most uncivilized, as upon the invention of substitutes for water. To hold that this general aversion to that liquid has no basis in the preservative instinct of the race is to be unscientific⁠—and without science we are as the snakes and toads.

Poverty

A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. The number of plans for its abolition equals that of the reformers who suffer from it, plus that of the philosophers who know nothing about it. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.

Pray

To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Pre-Adamite

One of an experimental and apparently unsatisfactory race that antedated Creation and lived under conditions not easily conceived. Melsius believed them to have inhabited “the Void” and to have been something intermediate between fishes and birds. Little its known of them beyond the fact that they supplied Cain with a wife and theologians with a controversy.

Precedent

In Law, a previous decision, rule or practice which, in the absence of a definite statute, has whatever force and authority a Judge may choose to give it, thereby greatly simplifying his task of doing as he pleases. As there are precedents for everything, he has only to ignore those that make against his interest and accentuate those in the line of his desire. Invention of the precedent elevates the trial-at-law from the low estate of a fortuitous ordeal to the noble attitude of a dirigible arbitrament.

Precipitate

Anteprandial.

Precipitate in all, this sinner
Took action first, and then his dinner.

—⁠Judibras Predestination

The doctrine that all things occur according to programme. This doctrine should not be confused with that of foreordination, which means that all things are programmed, but does not affirm their occurrence, that being only an implication from other doctrines by which this is entailed. The difference is great enough to have deluged Christendom with ink, to say nothing of the gore. With the distinction of the two doctrines kept well in mind, and a reverent belief in both, one may hope to escape perdition if spared.

Predicament

The wage of consistency.

Predilection

The preparatory stage of disillusion.

Preexistence

An unnoted factor in creation.

Preference

A sentiment, or frame of mind, induced by the erroneous belief that one thing is better than another.

An ancient philosopher, expounding his conviction that life is no better than death, was asked by a disciple why, then, he did not die. “Because,” he replied, “death is no better than life.”

It is longer.

Prehistoric

Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.

He lived in a period prehistoric,
When all was absurd and phantasmagoric.
Born later, when