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

and dismal
Marsh, the gray and dismal kneedeep.
No, ’tis peerless William Bryan
Realizing that he’s Caught It,
Caught the Whangdepootenawah! Wheat

A cereal from which a tolerably good whisky can with some difficulty be made, and which is used also for bread. The French are said to eat more bread per capita of population than any other people, which is natural, for only they know how to make the stuff palatable.

White

Black.

Widow

A pathetic figure that the Christian world has agreed to take humorously, although Christ’s tenderness towards widows was one of the most marked features of his character.

Wine

Fermented grape-juice known to the Women’s Christian Union as “liquor,” sometimes as “rum.” Wine, madam, is God’s next best gift to man.

Wit

The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.

Witch

An ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil.

A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.

Witticism

A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted, and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a “joke.”

Woman

An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. It is credited by many of the elder zoologists with a certain vestigial docility acquired in a former state of seclusion, but naturalists of the postsusananthony period, having no knowledge of the seclusion, deny the virtue and declare that such as creation’s dawn beheld, it roareth now. The species is the most widely distributed of all beasts of prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe, from Greenland’s spicy mountains to India’s moral strand. The popular name (wolfman) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movements, especially the American variety (Felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be taught not to talk.

—⁠Balthasar Pober Worms’-Meat

The finished product of which we are the raw material. The contents of the Taj Mahal, the Tombeau Napoleon and the Grantarium. Worms’-meat is usually outlasted by the structure that houses it, but “this too must pass away.” Probably the silliest work in which a human being can engage is construction of a tomb for himself. The solemn purpose cannot dignify, but only accentuates by contrast the foreknown futility.

Ambitious fool! so mad to be a show!
How profitless the labor you bestow
Upon a dwelling whose magnificence
The tenant neither can admire nor know.

Build deep, build high, build massive as you can,
The wanton grassroots will defeat the plan
By shouldering asunder all the stones
In what to you would be a moment’s span.

Time to the dead so all unreckoned flies
That when your marble is all dust, arise,
If wakened, stretch your limbs and yawn⁠—
You’ll think you scarcely can have closed your eyes.

What though of all man’s works your tomb alone
Should stand till Time himself be overthrown?
Would it advantage you to dwell therein
Forever as a stain upon a stone?

—⁠Joel Huck Worship

Homo Creator’s testimony to the sound construction and fine finish of Deus Creatus. A popular form of abjection, having an element of pride.

Wrath

Anger of a superior quality and degree, appropriate to exalted characters and momentous occasions; as, “the wrath of God,” “the day of wrath,” etc. Amongst the ancients the wrath of kings was deemed sacred, for it could usually command the agency of some god for its fit manifestation, as could also that of a priest. The Greeks before Troy were so harried by Apollo that they jumped out of the frying-pan of the wrath of Chryses into the fire of the wrath of Achilles, though Agamemnon, the sole offender, was neither fried nor roasted. A similar noted immunity was that of David when he incurred the wrath of Yahveh by numbering his people, seventy thousand of whom paid the penalty with their lives. God is now Love, and a director of the census performs his work without apprehension of disaster.

X

X in our alphabet being a needless letter has an added invincibility to the attacks of the spelling reformers, and like them, will doubtless last as long as the language. X is the sacred symbol of ten dollars, and in such words as Xmas, Xn, etc., stands for Christ, not, as is popular supposed, because it represents a cross, but because the corresponding letter in the Greek alphabet is the initial of his name⁠—χριστός. If it represented a cross it would stand for St. Andrew, who “testified” upon one of that shape. In the algebra of psychology x stands for Woman’s mind. Words beginning with X are Grecian and will not be defined in this standard English dictionary.

Y Yankee

In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See damnyank.)

Year

A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

Yesterday

The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire past of age.

But yesterday I should have thought me blest
To stand high-pinnacled upon the peak
Of middle life and look adown the bleak
And unfamiliar foreslope to the West,
Where solemn shadows all the land invest
And stilly voices, half-remembered, speak
Unfinished prophecy, and witch-fires freak
The haunted twilight of the Dark of Rest.
Yea, yesterday my soul was all aflame
To stay the shadow on the dial’s face
At manhood’s noonmark! Now, in God His name
I chide aloud the little interspace
Disparting me from Certitude, and fain
Would know the dream and vision ne’er again.

—⁠Baruch Arnegriff

It is said that in his last illness the poet Arnegriff was attended at different times by seven doctors.

Yoke

An implement, madam, to whose Latin name, jugum, we owe one of the most illuminating words in our language⁠—a word that defines the matrimonial situation with precision, point and poignancy. A thousand apologies for withholding it.

Youth

The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer.

Youth