As a lover of words, and satire, I am very easily amused by this stuff. If you are easily offended, you may not find this stuff as amusing as I do. You have been warned.
First, here are a few entries from the Devil's Dictionary (provided by Wikipedia):
You can access the whole book online at Project Gutenberg or at this site.
- Abstainer
- A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
- Arrest
- Formally to detain one accused of unusualness.
God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh
-The Unauthorized Version
- Barometer
- An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.
- Bore
- A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
- Cannon
- An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.
- Cat
- A soft indestructible automaton provided by Nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.
- Christian
- One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
I dreamed I stood upon a hill, and, lo!
The godly multitudes walked to and fro
Beneath, in Sabbath garments fitly clad,
With pious mien, appropriately sad,
While all the church bells made a solemn din --
A fire-alarm to those who lived in sin.
Then saw I gazing thoughtfully below,
With tranquil face, upon that holy show
A tall, spare figure in a robe of white,
Whose eyes diffused a melancholy light.
"God keep you, strange," I exclaimed. "You are
No doubt (your habit shows it) from afar;
And yet I entertain the hope that you,
Like these good people, are a Christian too."
He raised his eyes and with a look so stern
It made me with a thousand blushes burn
Replied -- his manner with disdain was spiced:
"What! I a Christian? No, indeed! I'm Christ."
- G.J.
- Congratulation
- The civility of envy.
- Corporation
- An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
- Cynic
- A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
- Education
- That which discloses from the wise, and disguises from the foolish, their lack of understanding.
- Electricity
- The cause of all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else.
- Helpmate
- A wife, or bitter half.
- Idiot
- A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
- Innards
- The stomach, heart, soul, and other bowels.
- Insurrection
- An unsuccessful revolution.
- Justice
- A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.
- Learning
- The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
- Logic
- The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
- Love
- A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
- Marriage
- The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
- Mayonnaise
- One of the sauces that serve the French in place of a state religion.
- Patience
- A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
- Philosophy
- A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
- Pray
- To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
- Rational
- Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.
- Religion
- A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
- Road
- A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go.
- Sabbath
- A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.
- Vote
- The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
- 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 is the true Saturnian Reign, the Golden Age on earth again, when figs are grown on thistles, and pigs betailed with whistles and, wearing silken bristles, live ever in clover, and cows fly over, delivering milk at every door, and Justice is never heard to snore, and every assassin is made a ghost and, howling, is cast into Baltimost--Polydore Smith.
- Zeal
- A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced.
Two of the more recent variations are The Devil's Dictionary 2.0, which seems to be a more web-world approach, and Devil's Dictionary X, which is more general.
Here are some samples from the 2.0 version:
blog, verbAnd here are a few samples from the X version (these are some of the newest definitions):
To noisily and simultaneously void one’s spleen, stomach, bladder and bowels.
“Get outta my way! I think I’m gonna blog!”
caffeine, noun
A contract, wherein a regular heartbeat is exchanged for the ability to introduce subtle bugs, late at night, the day before a product ships.
copyright, noun
The notion that you can protect from the future what you stole from the past.
“The Devil’s Dictionary (2.0) is copyright © 2003 Greg Knauss.”
instant message, noun
The shortest path between a middle-aged man and a conviction for statutory solicitation.
MSM, acronym
An acronym for “mainstream media,” or a crutch that bloggers have leaned on so often that they’ve squashed it down to three tiny letters.
- Feng Shui
- 1. expensive Chinese fertilizer.
- 2. Mandarin for “Sinophilic pansy.”
- open thread
- a blogosphere burnout mainstay which combines the sentiments, “I’ve got nothing,” with, “You jerks go ahead and fill up another page for my Google ads in the meanwhile, okay.”
- Santa Claus
- the champion of secular tyranny; the Agnostic’s answer to church-based behavioral modification techniques for children; training wheels for Jesus.
- evil
- pejorative for unproductive.
- caution
- 1. instructional word on how to proceed when a woman brings up the topic of her weight.
- 2. instructional word on how to proceed when a woman brings up a topic.
- 3. a highway signpost, useful in alerting one to the proximity of the landmarks of the deaths of town officials’ drunk-driving relatives.
- 4. n, the act of supplying those crack dealers upstairs with enough bong hits per week to keep them from robbing and/or raping you out of irritated, sober boredom.
- serial killer
- 1. one who feels liberated by his first kill, with a slight tendency toward anal retention; a serialist.
- 2. a graduate of any creative writing program; a writer.
- 3. a near graduate of any music program; a musicologist.
- 4. a combination psychopath/crossword puzzle enthusiast, extroverted and self-actualized; some particularly successful examples are quoted on the back of Anthony Robbins’s latest books.
- ASCII
- the Turing complete alphabet of the Devil which can be used to spell any word written after 1 January 1970.
- Annunciation, the
- the incredible event from which proceeds the expression, “Holy fuck.”
- courtesy flush
- a round of lay-offs which calms the shareholders long enough to slip them the old Chapter 11 a few months down the road.
- poet
- 1. a middle-aged housewife who has discovered that writing a novel is more difficult than Harlequin’s back catalog might lead one to conclude.
more at mother. - 2. an affected and overly sensitive young man who has discovered a field in which he will never face harsh judgement as no one in the world reads poetry and will ever see his work.
more at relativity, genius, and suicide. - 3. a tone-deaf rapper.
compare with rapper
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