the devils dictionary

n. One of Imagination's most precious possessions.

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The rising People, hot and out of breath,
Roared round the palace: "Liberty or death!"
"If death will do," the King said, "let me reign;
You'll have, I'm sure, no reason to complain."
—Martha Braymance

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. Literally a freedman; hence, one who is in bondage to his passions.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. One who is compelled by the evidence to believe in free will, and whose will is therefore free to reject that doctrine.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. In the nature of an unprivileged excommunication.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. A lawyer with a roving commission.


(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

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 statute. 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, the bold and discerning writer who, 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 Shakspeare 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.

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God said: "Let Spirit perish into Form,"
And lexicographers arose, a swarm!
Thought fled and left her clothing, which they took,
And catalogued each garment in a book.
Now, from her leafy covert when she cries:
"Give me my clothes and I'll return," they rise
And scan the list, and say without compassion:
"Excuse us — they are mostly out of fashion."
—Sigismund Smith

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. A descendant of Levi, from whose posterity the Lord ordained all the Jewish priests — an instance of nepotism deserving of the severest censure, as incompatible with free institutions and the principle of civil and religious equality.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

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 Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. The kind of political and social reformer who is more concerned to bring others down to his plane than to lift himself to theirs.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

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 of 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."

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. An infernal river whose waters caused those who drank them to forget all they knew; whereas the drinker of Spring Valley forgets nothing but the Third Commandment and the pious precepts of a sainted mother.
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n. Authors of other dictionaries.

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:

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

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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.
(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. Lucid intervals in a disordered life.

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The Judge:
You lazy dog! all industry you shirk
As 'twere a crime — why don't you go to work?

The Tough Citizen:
I'm always planning to, but, may it please your
Honor, I do never get the leisure.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. A person who goes to the capital of his country to increase his own; one who makes laws and money.
(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. A gift from one who is legging it out of this vale of tears.
(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

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

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n. Dr. Bartlett, of the Bulletin.
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n. [1.] The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious. [2.] The kind of ignorance affected by (and affecting) civilized races, as distinguished from Ignorance, the sort of learning incurred by savages. See NONSENSE.


(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. A union of two or more parties, factions or associations for promoting some purpose, commonly nefarious.

(also: football)
(also: basketball)
(also: nba)
(also: nfl)
(also: baseball)
(also: arab legue)



(also: The Devil's Dictionary)