The Devil's Dictionary (13 page)

Barel Dort

JEWS-HARP, n. An unmusical instrument, played by holding it fast with
the teeth and trying to brush it away with the finger.

JOSS-STICKS, n. Small sticks burned by the Chinese in their pagan
tomfoolery, in imitation of certain sacred rites of our holy religion.

JUSTICE, n. A commodity which is a more or less adulterated condition
the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes
and personal service.

K is a consonant that we get from the Greeks, but it can be traced
away back beyond them to the Cerathians, a small commercial nation
inhabiting the peninsula of Smero. In their tongue it was called
Klatch
, which means "destroyed." The form of the letter was
originally precisely that of our H, but the erudite Dr. Snedeker
explains that it was altered to its present shape to commemorate the
destruction of the great temple of Jarute by an earthquake,
circa
730 B.C. This building was famous for the two lofty columns of its
portico, one of which was broken in half by the catastrophe, the other
remaining intact. As the earlier form of the letter is supposed to
have been suggested by these pillars, so, it is thought by the great
antiquary, its later was adopted as a simple and natural—not to say
touching—means of keeping the calamity ever in the national memory.
It is not known if the name of the letter was altered as an additional
mnemonic, or if the name was always
Klatch
and the destruction one
of nature's puns. As each theory seems probable enough, I see no
objection to believing both—and Dr. Snedeker arrayed himself on
that side of the question.

KEEP, v.t.

He willed away his whole estate,
And then in death he fell asleep,
Murmuring:  "Well, at any rate,
My name unblemished I shall keep."
But when upon the tomb 'twas wrought
Whose was it?—for the dead keep naught.

Durang Gophel Arn

KILL, v.t. To create a vacancy without nominating a successor.

KILT, n. A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and
Americans in Scotland.

KINDNESS, n. A brief preface to ten volumes of exaction.

KING, n. A male person commonly known in America as a "crowned head,"
although he never wears a crown and has usually no head to speak of.

A king, in times long, long gone by,
Said to his lazy jester:
"If I were you and you were I
My moments merrily would fly—
Nor care nor grief to pester."
"The reason, Sire, that you would thrive,"
The fool said—"if you'll hear it—
Is that of all the fools alive
Who own you for their sovereign, I've
The most forgiving spirit."

Oogum Bem

KING'S EVIL, n. A malady that was formerly cured by the touch of the
sovereign, but has now to be treated by the physicians. Thus "the
most pious Edward" of England used to lay his royal hand upon the
ailing subjects and make them whole—

a crowd of wretched souls
That stay his cure:  their malady convinces
The great essay of art; but at his touch,
Such sanctity hath Heaven given his hand,
They presently amend,

as the "Doctor" in
Macbeth
hath it. This useful property of the
royal hand could, it appears, be transmitted along with other crown
properties; for according to "Malcolm,"

'tis spoken
To the succeeding royalty he leaves
The healing benediction.

But the gift somewhere dropped out of the line of succession: the
later sovereigns of England have not been tactual healers, and the
disease once honored with the name "king's evil" now bears the humbler
one of "scrofula," from
scrofa
, a sow. The date and author of the
following epigram are known only to the author of this dictionary, but
it is old enough to show that the jest about Scotland's national
disorder is not a thing of yesterday.

Ye Kynge his evill in me laye,
Wh. he of Scottlande charmed awaye.
He layde his hand on mine and sayd:
"Be gone!"  Ye ill no longer stayd.
But O ye wofull plyght in wh.
I'm now y-pight:  I have ye itche!

The superstition that maladies can be cured by royal taction is
dead, but like many a departed conviction it has left a monument of
custom to keep its memory green. The practice of forming a line and
shaking the President's hand had no other origin, and when that great
dignitary bestows his healing salutation on

strangely visited people,
All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,
The mere despair of surgery,

he and his patients are handing along an extinguished torch which once
was kindled at the altar-fire of a faith long held by all classes of
men. It is a beautiful and edifying "survival"—one which brings
the sainted past close home in our "business and bosoms."

KISS, n. A word invented by the poets as a rhyme for "bliss." It is
supposed to signify, in a general way, some kind of rite or ceremony
appertaining to a good understanding; but the manner of its
performance is unknown to this lexicographer.

KLEPTOMANIAC, n. A rich thief.

KNIGHT, n.

Once a warrior gentle of birth,
Then a person of civic worth,
Now a fellow to move our mirth.
Warrior, person, and fellow—no more:
We must knight our dogs to get any lower.
Brave Knights Kennelers then shall be,
Noble Knights of the Golden Flea,
Knights of the Order of St. Steboy,
Knights of St. Gorge and Sir Knights Jawy.
God speed the day when this knighting fad
Shall go to the dogs and the dogs go mad.

KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been
written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a
wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

LABOR, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

LAND, n. A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The
theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control
is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the
superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some
have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own
implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass
are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that
if the whole area of
terra firma
is owned by A, B and C, there will
be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to
exist.

A life on the ocean wave,
A home on the rolling deep,
For the spark the nature gave
I have there the right to keep.
They give me the cat-o'-nine
Whenever I go ashore.
Then ho! for the flashing brine—
I'm a natural commodore!

Dodle

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding
another's treasure.

LAOCOON, n. A famous piece of antique scripture representing a priest
of that name and his two sons in the folds of two enormous serpents.
The skill and diligence with which the old man and lads support the
serpents and keep them up to their work have been justly regarded as
one of the noblest artistic illustrations of the mastery of human
intelligence over brute inertia.

LAP, n. One of the most important organs of the female system—an
admirable provision of nature for the repose of infancy, but chiefly
useful in rural festivities to support plates of cold chicken and
heads of adult males. The male of our species has a rudimentary lap,
imperfectly developed and in no way contributing to the animal's
substantial welfare.

LAST, n. A shoemaker's implement, named by a frowning Providence as
opportunity to the maker of puns.

Ah, punster, would my lot were cast,
Where the cobbler is unknown,
So that I might forget his last
And hear your own.

Gargo Repsky

LAUGHTER, n. An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the
features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious
and, though intermittent, incurable. Liability to attacks of laughter
is one of the characteristics distinguishing man from the animals—
these being not only inaccessible to the provocation of his example,
but impregnable to the microbes having original jurisdiction in
bestowal of the disease. Whether laughter could be imparted to
animals by inoculation from the human patient is a question that has
not been answered by experimentation. Dr. Meir Witchell holds that
the infection character of laughter is due to the instantaneous
fermentation of
sputa
diffused in a spray. From this peculiarity he
names the disorder
Convulsio spargens
.

LAUREATE, adj. Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the
Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign's court, acting as
dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal
funeral. Of all incumbents of that high office, Robert Southey had
the most notable knack at drugging the Samson of public joy and
cutting his hair to the quick; and he had an artistic color-sense
which enabled him so to blacken a public grief as to give it the
aspect of a national crime.

LAUREL, n. The
laurus
, a vegetable dedicated to Apollo, and
formerly defoliated to wreathe the brows of victors and such poets as
had influence at court. (
Vide supra.
)

LAW, n.

Once Law was sitting on the bench,
And Mercy knelt a-weeping.
"Clear out!" he cried, "disordered wench!
Nor come before me creeping.
Upon your knees if you appear,
'Tis plain your have no standing here."
Then Justice came.  His Honor cried:
"
Your
status?—devil seize you!"
"
Amica curiae,
" she replied—
"Friend of the court, so please you."
"Begone!" he shouted—"there's the door—
I never saw your face before!"

LAWFUL, adj. Compatible with the will of a judge having jurisdiction.

LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

LAZINESS, n. Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.

LEAD, n. A heavy blue-gray metal much used in giving stability to
light lovers—particularly to those who love not wisely but other
men's wives. Lead is also of great service as a counterpoise to an
argument of such weight that it turns the scale of debate the wrong
way. An interesting fact in the chemistry of international
controversy is that at the point of contact of two patriotisms lead is
precipitated in great quantities.

Hail, holy Lead!—of human feuds the great
And universal arbiter; endowed
With penetration to pierce any cloud
Fogging the field of controversial hate,
And with a sift, inevitable, straight,
Searching precision find the unavowed
But vital point.  Thy judgment, when allowed
By the chirurgeon, settles the debate.
O useful metal!—were it not for thee
We'd grapple one another's ears alway:
But when we hear thee buzzing like a bee
We, like old Muhlenberg, "care not to stay."
And when the quick have run away like pellets
Jack Satan smelts the dead to make new bullets.

LEARNING, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

LECTURER, n. One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear
and his faith in your patience.

LEGACY, n. A gift from one who is legging it out of this vale of
tears.

LEONINE, adj. Unlike a menagerie lion. Leonine verses are those in
which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end, as
in this famous passage from Bella Peeler Silcox:

The electric light invades the dunnest deep of Hades.
Cries Pluto, 'twixt his snores:  "O tempora! O mores!"

It should be explained that Mrs. Silcox does not undertake to
teach pronunciation of the Greek and Latin tongues. Leonine verses
are so called in honor of a poet named Leo, whom prosodists appear to
find a pleasure in believing to have been the first to discover that a
rhyming couplet could be run into a single line.

LETTUCE, n. An herb of the genus
Lactuca
, "Wherewith," says that
pious gastronome, Hengist Pelly, "God has been pleased to reward the
good and punish the wicked. For by his inner light the righteous man
has discerned a manner of compounding for it a dressing to the
appetency whereof a multitude of gustible condiments conspire, being
reconciled and ameliorated with profusion of oil, the entire
comestible making glad the heart of the godly and causing his face to
shine. But the person of spiritual unworth is successfully tempted to
the Adversary to eat of lettuce with destitution of oil, mustard, egg,
salt and garlic, and with a rascal bath of vinegar polluted with
sugar. Wherefore the person of spiritual unworth suffers an
intestinal pang of strange complexity and raises the song."

LEVIATHAN, n. An enormous aquatic animal mentioned by Job. Some
suppose it to have been the whale, but that distinguished
ichthyologer, Dr. Jordan, of Stanford University, maintains with
considerable heat that it was a species of gigantic Tadpole (
Thaddeus
Polandensis
) or Polliwig—
Maria pseudo-hirsuta
. For an
exhaustive description and history of the Tadpole consult the famous
monograph of Jane Potter,
Thaddeus of Warsaw
.

LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of
recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does
what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and
mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his
dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas
his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural
servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial
power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a
chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example)
mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men
thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however
desirable its restoration to favor—whereby the process of
impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary,
recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow
at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has
no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary"
—although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven
forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that
was
in the
dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when
from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own
meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a
Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end
and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy
preservation—sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion—the
lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which
his Creator had not created him to create.