The Roycroft Dictionary Part 5

HUSBAND: A b.o.o.by prize in life's lottery.

HELTA-SKELTA: The new subst.i.tute for Strenuosity. Puts you to sleep while you work. Helta-Skelta is a prepossessing product made from posthole polyglot piecrust, and is warranted free from teddine, swaboda, korona, kabo and karezza. Served face to face with cream or without, it is spit out as soon as chewed, and can not be swallowed. Locate the lavatory and try a free sample.

HEN: The only animal in Nature that can lay around and make money.

HIGHBROW: 1. A person who has grown so wise that the obvious escapes him. 2. One who reveres knowledge with superst.i.tious awe, and whose wors.h.i.+p of observation approaches the ecstatic. 3. One who believes that an atom is a monstrance that conceals the Holy Ghost of Force.

HIGHFLYER: Any man who rides on the running-board, when he might just as well be inside the limousine.

HISTORY: 1. A collection of epitaphs. 2. Gossip well told.

HOME: 1. A place where we go to change our clothes so as to go somewhere else. 2. The abode of the heart.

HUMOR: The tabasco sauce that gives life a flavor.

HUMILITY: 1. The slippered patience of the disinherited. 2. The grogginess of the Ego. 3. To recede to the very bottom of one's own littleness. 4. The Ma.r.s.eillaise of the disappointed. 5. The odor of sanct.i.ty. 6. An Iago in plush and lavender. 7. Pride getting ready for a Pounce.

HONEYMOON: 1. A happiness not quite worn out. 2. A postlude to a wedding-march and a prelude to a funeral ditto. _E. g._, "I did not drive Adam and Eve out of Eden because they ate my pet pippin, but because they insisted on carrying on their honeymoon before the modest animals."--From _The Private Journal of Demiurge_.

HOPE: 1. A subst.i.tute for yesterday. 2. A mask that dying persons wear.

3. A system of metaphysics founded by Ananias. Antonyms: Reason, imagination, experience.

HOUSE: 1. A building with four walls and a roof. 2. A rendezvous for burglars. 3. A dormitory for servants. 4. The Mecca of bedbugs. (The difference between a house and a home is this: A house may fall down, but a home is broken up.)

HUMAN LOVE: The one indestructible thing in Nature.

HUMAN DYNAMO: Any man who gets everything charged.

IDEAL: 1. The dreams of a sin to come. 2. The mirage of failure. 3. The venom of the lost. 4. An excuse for murder, tyranny or for self-aggrandizement. 5. Any theory that justifies our secret itch.

IDEALIST: 1. A gla.s.sblower. 2. A somnambulist who insists on stepping out of a solid window into the air. 3. A person who lives in a tower of porcelain and dines on pumpernickel and lobscouse. 4. A man who fills his gasoline-tank with attar of roses and expects the motor to run.

INTELLIGENCE: The grand inquisitor that tortures from every truth the confession that it lies, and from every lie a confession of its divine necessity.

IDEAL LIFE: Man's normal life, as we shall some day know it.

IF: 1. A tightrope that stretches from But to But. 2. A small, magical, automatic hinge that can swing the doors of Chance in any direction. 3.

A fatality endowed with free will. 4. The verbal sword of Damocles. 5. A dizzy precipice at the end of every declarative sentence. 6. A pole around which the future and the past play hide-and-seek. 7. The vorspiel to the piker's threnody. _E. g._ (Scene: a narrow bridge.): "Let me pa.s.s, fellow! my name is Must, and I desire to cross." If (standing in the middle of the bridge): "You d.a.m.n fool, don't you see I am the end of the bridge? There is no Must nor Might that can go beyond me."

IMITATION: The sincerest form of insult.

IGNORAMUS: Any man who flatters himself that he is educated.

IMAGINATION: 1. A marvelous little multicolored drugget that covers the rough and splintered floor of reality. 2. A haunted chateau. 3. A vestibule between Time and Eternity. 4. The giant enemy of reality. 5.

The red Pantheon of Lucifer. 6. The candle-gleam of science; the flambeau of the lover; the constellated nebulae of the poet. 7. The glittering west-dust of a hidden innominate sun. 8. The seigniory of untrammeled instincts; the fief of unsanctified dreams; the palfrey that carries us toward nebulous spiritual hills. 9. The plasma of G.o.ds. 10.

Puck strapped to the back of Balaam's a.s.s. 11. The Shakespeare of mental faculties. 12. The avatar of the emotions. 13. A golden key that unlocks the bastile of logic. 14. A ladder to the fourth dimension. 15. A sublime liar. 16. Taking the halter off your thoughts and giving them a good kick behind. 17. Sympathy illumined by brains.

IMITATOR: A man who succeeds in being an imitation.

IMMORTALITY: 1. A reward given to infidels and atheists by a somewhat humorous G.o.d, for not groveling before Him and annoying Him with importunities. 2. A system of punishment for suicides, which makes suicide impossible, thereby putting one over on the ingrate who was tired of the gift of life, by compelling him to live forever, w.i.l.l.y-nilly. 3. A valueless thing, because unlimited in quant.i.ty, which those hotly intent upon achieving will forfeit through the law which provides that that for which we clutch we lose. 4. A condition sought by political officeholders where the inc.u.mbent never either dies or resigns. 5. A state of being encouraged by annuitants, and those who live in the Garden of Allah-Money. 6. A flimflam offer by a theologian of inchoate t.i.tle to improved real estate in the Sky for real estate, rentals and cash on Earth. 7. A doctrine that the rich teach the poor for good and sufficient reasons. 8. Divine Compensation for the starving. 9. A superfluous addition to life; to go on living after one desires and hopes to remain dead.

INDEPENDENCE: An achievement, not a bequest.

IMPERIALISM: Tyranny, hiding behind the sacred name of Humanity.

INFIDEL: One who defames his Creator and impeaches his own reason by believing in Orthodox Christianity.

INFIDELITY: To remain faithful to one's self, and to be unfaithful to some one else's faith. In religion, to think; in the marriage inst.i.tution, to fall in love; in business, to do the thing to the other fellow that the other fellow intends to do to you, and do it first.

ISSUE: In physiology, something that comes up and out; in politics, something that goes down and in.

INGRAt.i.tUDE: 1. A girl who is too busy to acknowledge receipt of a Christmas present. 2. The portion of the man who has done well; and a fight with the fox you have warmed into life is imminent.

INFUSORIA: The entire human race with the exception of Homer, Richard Wagner, Dante, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Rodin, Raphael, aeschylus, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer and Edward Bok, in whose tremendous skulls we live and move and have our being, like a whirlwind of germs in the vats of the Absolute.

INGRATE: Any person who has got something for nothing, and wants more on the same terms.

INITIATIVE: Doing the right thing without being told.

IRONY: The cactus-plant that sprouts over the tomb of our dead illusions.

JUDICIOUS: 1. A state of mind wherein things are weighed in an imponderable scale; a conjunction of two negatives in a void. 2. To be wanting in foolishness, character or brains. 3. An exquisite and delicate perception of the difference between two things that are exactly alike, or the total unlikeness between two things that are absolutely different. 4. An umbrella to be carried on clear days as well as on rainy ones, thus protecting the possessor from everything. 5. To lie flat on your puss while the juggernaut of Opinion goes over you; to stand perfectly still between two streetcars going in opposite directions. 6. To see what's coming and avoid it by taking all sides.

JOURNALIST: A newspaperman out of a job.

JURY: 1. The stupidity of one brain multiplied by twelve. 2. A collection of sedentary owls. 3. The humble apology of Civilization to Savagery. _E. g._, "Whatever exists may be touched, but a jury is an exception to this universal law--it must be reached."

JUSTICE: A system of revenge where the State imitates the criminal.

JOHN DOUGH PROCEEDINGS: A hunt for graftheimers.

JUDGE: 1. A man with ankylosis of the ego, who is jealous of the stenographer for sufficient reasons. 2. One who learns law from lawyers and is excluded from the game, getting his in honors.

KING: 1. In the presence of genius, a pleb. 2. A vestige. 3. One whose chief diversion lately has been to watch himself grow beautifully less.

4. A First Cause run to seed. 5. Divine Right tempered by bombs.

KINDERGARTEN: The greatest scheme ever devised--for the education of parents.

KNOCKING: A slow but sure way of putting the skids under your prospects.

Push in the door softly, and all things are yours--knock and nothing shall be opened unto you.

KNOWLEDGE: The distilled essence of our intuitions, corroborated by experience. Knowledge is what I know; wisdom is what I see; theology is what I guess.

LATER: The Utopia of Postponement; a marvelous door of gold at the end of every perspective, to which Procrastination holds the keys. The Concierge of tomorrow. (Some things are done sooner, others are done now, but most things are done later; hence, manana, dreams and regrets.)