LINEN, n. “A kind of cloth the making of which, when made of hemp, entails a great waste of hemp.”
PENITENT, adj. Undergoing or awaiting punishment.
Women of genius commonly have masculine faces, figures and manners. In transplanting brains to an alien soil God leaves a little of the original earth clinging to the roots.
PERORATION, n. The explosion of an oratorical rocket. It dazzles, but to an observer having the wrong kind of nose its most conspicuous peculiarity is the smell of the several kinds of powder used in preparing it.
APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom. The flabby wine-skin of his brain Yields to some pathologic strain, And voids from its unstored abysm The driblet of an aphorism. “The Mad Philosopher,” 1697.
QUEEN, n. A woman by whom the realm is ruled when there is a king, and through whom it is ruled when there is not.
SARCOPHAGUS, n. Among the Greeks a coffin which being made of a certain kind of carnivorous stone, had the peculiar property of devouring the body placed in it.
Least said is soon disavowed.
PLAGIARIZE, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.
BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters – the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind.
VANITY, n. The tribute of a fool to the worth of the nearest ass.
LIMB, n. The branch of a tree or the leg of an American woman.
RESPIRATOR, n. An apparatus fitted over the nose and mouth of an inhabitant of London, whereby to filter the visible universe in its passage to the lungs.
MACE, n. A staff of office signifying authority. Its form, that of a heavy club, indicates its original purpose and use in dissuading from dissent.
ETHNOLOGY, n. The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists.
International arbitration may be defined as the substitution of many burning questions for a smoldering one.
Theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumptions and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure.
RECONCILIATION, n. A suspension of hostilities. An armed truce for the purpose of digging up the dead.
RATIONAL, adj. Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.
RECREATION, n. A particular kind of dejection to relieve a general fatigue.