The Roycroft Dictionary Part 9

RELIGION: Philosophy touched with emotion.

RAILROADS: The most important factor for progress and enlightenment in the world today.

RENUNCIATION: The act of giving up your seat in a street-car to a pretty woman, and then purposely stepping on an old man's toes.

REFORMER: 1. One who causes the rich to band themselves against the poor. 2. One who educates the people to appreciate the things they need.

REGION: A specific, definite s.p.a.ce, as distinguished from any other specific, definite s.p.a.ce; as, East Aurora, Barren Island, Kalamazoo, Sea Grit, Beverly.

REPARTEE: Any remark which is so clever that it makes the listener wish he had said it himself.

RESIGNATION: 1. A truce with ourselves in order to give us time to bury our living. 2. Pride walling itself up. 3. To keep shop without a show-window. 4. To go to sleep in the lap of the inevitable. 5. A covered walk to the interior of ourselves; a subway to some other form of trespa.s.s; a peephole into the enemy's fortress. 6. To play possum when one hears the footfall of Fate on the stairs.

REPUTATION: A bubble which a man bursts when he tries to blow it for himself.

RESURRECTION: The hypothetical New-Year's Day in the calendar of the dead.

REMORSE: That feeling which we all have when the thing fails to work, and the world knows it. The form that failure takes when it has made a grab and got nothing.

RESPECTABILITY: The d.i.c.key on the bosom of civilization.

ROMANCE: Where the hero begins by deceiving himself and ends by deceiving others.

RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION: 1. Hate that scorches like h.e.l.l, but which the possessor thinks proves he is right. 2. Your own wrath as opposed to the shocking bad temper of others.

RIGHTEOUSNESS: 1. Only a form of commonsense. 2. Wise expediency.

REVIVAL: Religion with a vaudeville attachment.

ROOSEVELT (THEODORE): A harangue-outang.

RUINS: 1. The hope of the ancient yesterday. 2. Absolute proof that the world of dreams, like the planet earth, is round. (Ruins are chiefly notable for the number of enlightened liars, called archeologists, they produce.)

SACRILEGE: 1. Any impolite act in the presence of a Humbug. 2. To shock the sensibilities of a n.o.body. 3. To kill a mystical Mule or swap jokes in public with a Ghost.

SACRED SOIL: That which is well tilled.

SAINT: 1. Generally speaking, a person who retires into the wilderness of the spirit in order to coddle a ruling weakness. 2. To become polite toward G.o.d and His universe. 3. A steeplejack on miraged minarets.

SAINTs.h.i.+P: The exclusive possession of those who have either worn out or never had the capacity to sin.

SANITY: The ability to do team-work.

SALOON: The poor man's club; run with intent to make the poor man poorer.

SAVAGES: Men who like to go to war.

SANATORIUM: The place where a man is sent who has money, as opposed to "Bughouse," meaning the place where a man is sent who has no bank-balance.

SATIRIST: 1. A taxidermist of the Past, Present and Future; one who disembowels, stuffs and mounts all the G.o.ds, living and dead; one who fills up with straw and sawdust all illusions. 2. An esoteric mimic. 3.

A being with an eye in the back of his head. 4. A postlude to the day's funeral march; a prelude to freedom.

SCANDAL: Gossip related by a small-bore.

SALVATION: Redemption from a belief in miracles.

SCHOLAR: 1. An ornate fossil. 2. A deadly ptomain that infests all forms of dynamic thought. 3. An impenetrable ma.s.s of matter that contains within itself the principle of unchangeability. 4. A turtle on whose sh.e.l.l is carved certain hieroglyphic lettering; such as, Ph. D., M. D., LL. D. 5. A medieval owl that roosts in universities, especially those that are endowed. 6. A plaster-of-Paris convolute. 7. A man, long on advice but short on action, who thinks he thinks. 8. One who draws his breath and salary. 9. Anybody with a bulging brow and no visible means of support.

SELF-RELIANCE: The name we give to the egotism of the man who succeeds.

SCHOOL: A training-place--mental, physical, moral. Good boys are boys at work. Bad boys are good boys who misdirect their energies.

SCIENCE: 1. The knowledge of the common people cla.s.sified and carried one step further. 2. Accurate organized knowledge founded on fact. 3.

Cla.s.sified superst.i.tion.

SECRET: 1. A thing we give to others to keep for us. 2. Something known only to a few.

SEER: The scout of civilization.

SELF-CONTROL: The ability to restrain a laugh at the wrong place.

SILENCE: A trick of the human gullet that conceals weakness or emptiness.

SHEENY: A Jew who has more money than you have.

SHOAL: Shallow, literary, theological. (By extension, Columbia, Harvard, Yale and some other universities are sometimes called shoal-marks.)

SINCERITY: 1. A mental att.i.tude acquired after long practise by man, in order to conceal his ulterior motives. 2. To be childish, to be senile.

3. To lack invention, imagination or character. (A sincere man is one who bluffs only a part of the time.)

SIN: Perverted power. The man without capacity for sin has no ability to do good--isn't that so? His soul is a Dead Sea that supports neither ameba nor fish, neither noxious bacilli nor useful life.

SERVILITY: 1. The instinct of superiority in its lowest form. 2. The politician's virtue. 3. A means of getting on. 4. A natural law, the violation of which makes one famous and poor.

SHERMAN ACT: A scheme to entrap men who set large numbers of people to work at employment profitable to everybody concerned.

SOBER: 1. To be bored, unhappy, "all in." 2. To be born or live in Philadelphia. 3. To be without money, to be dest.i.tute. 4. To die. _E.

g._, "Thank G.o.d, I am sober at last!" Dying words of Potodorus in _Two Gentlemen of Yonkers_.

SCOTCH: A verb meaning with care.

SELF-PROTECTION: The first law of life.

SOCIALIST: 1. A person easily peeved. 2. In economics, a school of thought founded by Cain. 3. A man who, so far as he himself is concerned, considers a thing done when he has suggested it.

SMACK: A crude, rude, vulgar and unsatisfactory subst.i.tute for a kiss.