n. A mental wolf in moral wool.


(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

Is a breed of human that chooses to identify in society" as people who play video games"

Unexpectedly and conspicuously beneficial to the person so describing it.

a sport which tests the extent of one's whacking ability: winning a round of golf will often require one to produce whacks of great intensity, but also gentler and more controlled whacks, and a canny player will certainly need to know the comparative advantages of different shafts and heads.

the aim is to produce only the minimum amount of whacks necessary in order to fill a hole.

the game is popular in scotland (anyone surprised?)

now pardon me while I use the ball washer.

(1822 – 1895) French biologist. Developed a cure for rabies and other infectious diseases.
(also: 100 most influential people in the world)
(also: louis pasteur quotes)

A portable sheath in which the ancient statesman and the aboriginal lawyer carried their lighter arguments.

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He extracted from his quiver,
Did the controversial Roman,
An argument well fitted
To the question as submitted,
Then addressed it to the liver,
Of the unpersuaded foeman.
—Oglum P. Boomp
(also: sex)
(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

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 infectious character of laughter is due to the instantaneous fermentation of sputa diffused in a spray. From this peculiarity he names the disorder Convulsio spargens.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. Creation's afterthought; an animal that Adam did not name.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

(noun): A game that's easy to learn but impossible to master, causing losers to hate it and winners to lord their superiority over everyone else. Just don't knock over the pieces in a fit of rage.

Rich people without money

(n.) a stubbornly elusive piece of knowledge.

life is full of mysteries, such as:
what keeps us from achieving world peace? is it greg?
are we alone in the universe, and if so why does god have such poor space management skills?
what kind of meat is used in salami, really?
who killed mr. black, and with what, and in which room?
why must trustycoffeemug make so many references to classic rock?

A race of ancient killers of mice and small birds. They merely tolerate humans thanks large to our ancestors viewing that as gods and feeding them. Mainly the feeding. They are ancient foes of the dogs.

(n.) an unexpectedly successful colony of the americas originally established as a free range insane asylum. at one point was marketed as a luxury vacation destination until the tourism board realized they weren't fooling anyone.

(n.) a mythical figure associated with the christian solstice holiday; a figure of terror who embodies wretched material excess while engaging in breaking-and-entering and contemptuous neglect of international borders

An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness. In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient, the humor that we mistake for it, like all humor, being tolerant and sympathetic. Moreover, although Americans are "endowed by their Creator" with abundant vice and folly, it is not generally known that these are reprehensible qualities, wherefore the satirist is popularly regarded as a sour-spirited knave, and his every victim's outcry for codefendants evokes a national assent.

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Hail Satire! be thy praises ever sung
In the dead language of a mummy's tongue,
For thou thyself art dead, and damned as well —
Thy spirit (usefully employed) in Hell.
Had it been such as consecrates the Bible
Thou hadst not perished by the law of libel.
—Barney Stims
(also: humor)

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

An exuse your blood relatives will use to take advantage of you.

(n.) the academic discipline of measuring time, usually making clocks.

... you thought it was something else. Admit it.

also referred to by the more proper but less euphonic title 'alice's adventures in wonderland'

a famous 1865 work of literature written by lewis carroll. despite its surrealist subject matter, some fringe literary theorists actually believe the book was not written while hopped up on hallucinogenic toads at all (mostly because all the surrealist imagery turns out to be rooted in some rather dull puns that you'll only get if you took mathematics and classics)

famed for its beloved characters, such as tweedledum and tweedledee, the walrus and the carpenter, humpty dumpty, the jabberwock, the lion and the unicorn, the red queen, the mad hatter and the march hare... which only proves how few people have actually read the damn thing, since those characters aren't in the book, they're only in the sequel, 'through the looking glass' (well, okay, the hatter and the hare are in both, and the first book at least has the white rabbit).

see also 'yellow submarine,' the book's hippie grandchild

A book that is commonly edited by a fool. Many persons of some small distinction compile scrap-books containing whatever they happen to read about themselves or employ others to collect. One of these egotists was addressed in the lines following, by Agamemnon Melancthon Peters:

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Dear Frank, that scrap-book where you boast
You keep a record true
Of every kind of peppered roast
That's made of you;

Wherein you paste the printed gibes
That revel round your name,
Thinking the laughter of the scribes
Attests your fame;

Where all the pictures you arrange
That comic pencils trace —
Your funny figure and your strange
Semitic face —

Pray lend it me. Wit I have not,
Nor art, but there I'll list
The daily drubbings you'd have got
Had God a fist.


(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

mathematical function defined as the value obtained when 'tan(x)' is put into a calculator