absolutism, absolutist
absolutism 1. noun
Practice of narrowing explanation, experience, view, and/or activity to a clutched singularity of the inauthentic.
absolutist 1. noun
One who refutes reification by standing on their head and by reducing the horizon to a single point, vanishing as authentic being that becomes in the process: "I am a messanger of the absolute, therefore I am".
act, actor, action, activity, activism, activist
act 1. noun
A thing done (a thing missing from leftoid PC where...).
Last act sacrifice generally by self in leftish & religious circles for a so-called greater good, a waste of time, see martyrdom.
2. verb
To play, to pretend, act up, act out.
advertising, advertisement (as with propaganda)
advertisement 1. noun
Map to the endless horizon, with the forbidden self as legend.
advertising 1. noun
Propaganda of the imaginary.
Flirtations from the spectacular.
Pheromone of Capital; attracts the ghost of a moth to its retinal image of reincarnation.
alienation, alienated, alienating, alien
alienation 1. noun
In its original juridical definition, alienation refers to "transfer of the title to property by one person to another by conveyance (as distinguished from inheritance): e.g., to alienate lands." Also, interestingly enough, mental "alienation" was a 19th century euphemism for insanity: "alienist" was the term for "psychiatrist" until early in this century. Marx used the term specifically as a synonym for the sale of labor in any form (i.e., "labor" both as labor-power itself (self-power), living labor, and a s dead labor, labor turned into an object, goods). To paraphrase Perlman in "The Reproduction of Daily Life", through sale, the labor of an individual becomes the property of another, it is appropriated by another, it comes under the control of another. In other words, a person's activity becomes the activity of another, the activity of its owner; it becomes alien to the person who performs it. Thus one's life, the accomplishments of an individual in the world, the difference which his life makes in the life of humanity, are not only transformed into labor, a painful condition for survival; they are transformed into alien activity, activity as if performed by the buyer of that labor. In capitalist societies, the architects, the engineers, the laborers, are not referred to as "builders": the man who buys their labor is called "the builder". The workers in a branch of industry are not referred to as "the producers": the owner of the industry, the management, or the corporate name is. The projects, calculations, and motions carried out by the workers are not their own, are not decided by them, but are executions of the orders of others and are thus alien to them; their living activity, their accomplishments, belong to capital. Academic sociologists, who take the sale of labor for granted, understand this alienation of labor as a feeling: the worker's activity 'appears' alien to the worker, it 'seems' to be controlled by another. However, any worker can explain to the academic sociologist that the alienation is not only a feeling and an idea in the worker's head, but a real fact about the worker's daily life. The sold activity is in fact alien to the worker; his labor is in fact controlled by its buyer. Alienation exists subjectively and objectively." "In exchange for his activity, the worker gets money, the means of survival in capitalist society. With this money s/he can buy commodities, things, but s/he cannot buy back her/his activity. This reveals a peculiar 'gap' in money as the 'universal equivalent'. People can sell commodities for money, and can buy the same commodities with money. They can sell their living activity for money. An unequal exchange hides under the appearance of equity in the exchange between capital and living labor. The things the worker buys back with wages are first of all consumer goods which enable them to survive, to reproduce their labour-power so as to be able to continue selling it; and these goods are objects for passive admiration - spectacles. They consume and admires the products of human activity passively. They do not exist in the world as active agents who transform it, but as helpless, impotent spectators; one may call this state of powerless admiration 'happiness', and since labor is painful, one may desire to be 'happy', namely inactive, all one's life (a condition similar to being dead). The commodities, the spectacles, consume the worker; s/he uses up living energy in passive admiration; s/he is consumed by things. In this sense, the more s/he has, the less s/he is." The consequences of this central fact, this alienation, by the vast majority of people, of their socially productive powers, of their very selves in a social sense, are devastating. More and more human relations become commodity relations -- people are brought together and interact, not out of some mutual affinity, but on terms defined by money exchange. Think of an average day: you get up, you go to work -- where the people around you, your co-workers, aren't there because they like working together, or because they all enjoy what they're doing, but because they have to be there, to receive wages, to survive. You get off work, go to the supermarket -- the other shoppers are alien; you have nothing in common with most of them except being there to buy. The same with the laundromat, the bar, nightclub or theater you go to. Human beings are mostly brought together in modern society to do things for money or to get things for money. We are the servants of money. Relationships based on real shared desire, on real affinity, are being rapidly squeezed out. No wonder the struggle for contact with another person feels genuine, that comes about as a result of the wills of the individuals, is so desperate. People who are treated as objects, as machines, and who are forced by the conditions of their lives to treat others the same way, start to acquire the characteristics of objects, of machines. Their senses grow dull from the constant attempt to avoid being bruised by more meaningless collisions, more empty exchanges with objectified people. Even thinking becomes pointless because it can't affect anything, so we forget how to think, or think only in spectacular, fetishized, reified categories offered by the ruling power. Life is reduced to survival, to the daily fight to keep from dying of boredom, to keep from seeing what our existence has become. But the more total alienation becomes, the more it forces people to wake up inside it: the energy of their desperation is the same energy that can build the new world. Revolutionaries are those whose alienated consciousness has become the consciousness of their own alienation, who begin to refuse the present world in its entirety. The first step is nihilism, the desire to negate categorically the whole bloody senseless nightmare. A nihilism which has acquired strategy, tactics, and analysis is already at the threshold of revolutionary theory. But revolutionary theory is a nihilism that has transformed itself from within: it recognizes its one positive in the subjective will and desires of human beings. It sees the old world as the totality of alienated relationships and begins to attack it on all fronts. The goal of the revolutionary movement can be nothing less than the end of all alienation.
Alienation cannot completely flip the object into the subject and vice-versa. Its inversion is but that of partiality. It is in this reservoir that a common project is to be born. We do have something in common with all we encounter on the terrain of shadows - and that is our will to live. It is in the subdued laugh, the wry wink, the paused truth that we will find a greater self locked within others - and they within us. The above can tend to bleaken a bit much, as if alienation can produce itself without us. Not true. It takes one to mangle.
altruism, altruist, altruistic
altruism 1. noun
Hell as myself; systemic praxis of loss of the self in the other. Leftoids practice this as the nuns and monks they are - hoping for sainthood and a crotchless statue presentation at the annual Martyr Awards.
altruistic 1. adjective
An act or view is deemed altruistic when the actor disappears from view.
altruist 1. noun
One who strives to annihilate meaningful existence except through voyeurism.
One so afraid of what they'll find in life, that they confine others to an externalized prison.
anarchy, anarchism, anarchist
anarchism 1. noun
The practice of dynamic or the impractice of commodified anarchy (see defintions below). In the fresh sense: the unity of life as both noun and verb, as unity of subject-predicate-object.
anarchy 1. noun
The state of no state. In flux. Openness to input and to output. Not deadlocked in some static organization or form. Not chaos as it is organized around and through the freeflowing and dynamic forces of our nature: expanded greed, passionate attraction, desire to create, fearlessness of imagination, and the intrigue with innovation.
anarchist 1. noun
One whose class consciousness sees and acts organizationally to supersed class society by forming the new society within the shell of class social relations. The best is yet to come and already exists, but needs to be freed from the (class) traditions of the past. Subjects need to be freed from being pseudo-objects and objects need to be used after being perceived not as "pseudo-subjects". This is the activity of the the anarchist: a unity of means and ends. It is therefore also a unity of the social and the individual. It is for liberty and socialism as neither one alone attacks class society at its core.
Fun at parties, especially ones based in separate(d) power....
Re-presented, commodified, mysticalized, and idealized "anarchist" definition: The content of anarchist thought: action this, action that. It's all very much the same and the fact that boring action is interesting is what makes the anarchists very void-like. Much like spectacularizing symbolic black into a fashionable commodity, they have taken all that anarchist movement ever was and voided it actively. Severing the social critique from social movement, they have isolated tantrums much like a spoiling part of the economy - drawing attention to the need for a capitalist repair and democratic suffering: equal persecution for all. Hardly democratic - it's concensus authoritarianism like its cousin, the State's terrorism. Hardly anarchist - it's imposing and has bullhorns and drums like its cousins, the Leninists. Hardly revolutionary - it's defined by other than itself as are its cousins, the reactionaries. They prefer throwing nothingness through nothingness to achieve - you guessed it - nothing! They are paltry emoticons with paltry demands and paltry methodology that at best embarrasses the reification within which they misbehave. They are the spectacle waving its arms - saying "me, me, me - I'm not here!" Yes. You aren't here or there but as shadows of the past, recuperating rebellion seeking more than the dead weight of losers from the past. Yours is to bully all those who wish to be now. Revolutionary stillbirths. Egalitarians of globanality. The Real Things. Reifications with a trademarked "attitude". Drink up and choke....
ancestor, ancestry, ancetoral
ancestry 1. noun
Death appears as the harsh victory of the law of our ancestors over the dimension of our becoming. It is a fact that, as productivity increases, each succeeding generation becomes smaller. The defeat of our fathers is revisited upon us as the limits of our world. Yes, structure is human, it is the monumentalisation of congealed sweat, sweat squeezed from old exploitation and represented as nature, the world we inhabit, the objective ground. We do not, in our insect-like comings and goings, make the immediate world in which we live, we do not make a contribution, on the contrary we are set in motion by it; a generation will pass before what we have done, as an exploited class, will seep through as an effect of objectivity. (Our wealth is laid down in heaven.) The structure of the world was built by the dead, they were paid in wages, and when the wages were spent and they were in the ground, what they had made continued to exist, these cities, roads and factories are their calcified bones. They had nothing but their wages to show for what they had done, who they were and what they did has been cancelled out. But what they made has continued into our present, their burial and decay is our present. This is the definition of class hatred. We are no closer now to rest, to freedom, to communism than they were, their sacrifice has bought us nothing, what they did counted for nothing, we have inherited nothing, but they did produce value, they did make the world in which we now live, the world that now oppresses us is constructed from the wealth they made, wealth that was taken from them as soon as they were paid a wage, taken and owned by someone else, owned and used to define the nature of class domination. We too must work, and the value we produce leaks away from us, from each only a trickle but in all a sea of it and that, for the next generation, will thicken into wealth for others to own and as a congealed structure it will be used to frame new enterprises in different directions. The violence of what they produced becomes the structure that dominates our existence. Our lives begin amidst the desecration of our ancestors, millions of people who went to their graves as failures, and forever denied experience of a full human existence, their being simply cancelled out; As our parents die, we can say truly that their lives were for nothing, that the black earth that is thrown down onto them blacks out our sky.
appropriation, appropriate, mis-appropriate, self-appropriate
appropriation 1. noun
That which happens when one is absorbed into the vanishing point.
self-appropriation 1. noun
That process by which the external and other are synthesized into one's self.
appropriate 1. verb
The act of becoming defined by this or that acquisition (propertied thing or state).
architecture, architect
architecture 1. noun
Everything beautiful is made in an ugly building.
Architecture is frozen Muzak.
architect 1. verb
Social act of self-design.
2. noun
One who acts upon the structure of the social; flipside of dweller.
art, artism, artist
art 1. noun
A cover, a beard for cultural parrots, parasites and informers called artists.
artist 1. noun
Layabout, liar, police spy, cultural pimp, bootlicker, frequently sighted in the company of the journalist - another form of rectal kisser.
association, associate
1. 2.
authenticity, authentic
authentic 1. adjective
Non-mediated, un-represented, and unalienated interactive experience with an environment, event, moment, person, or self A by conscious person B. Directly sensed, perceived, and conceived.
Untrammeled ability to step between being and becoming. Unmediated predication - except by approval - between "subjective" and "objective" being. Example: the "authentic" human experience is both socially self-managed and selfishly social.; it is not fragmented for the sake of hierarchical power, either socially or personally. There is no equational split (as in zero-sum) between me and "the other" because we are a dynamic moment and potential for each other's enrichment. Only when social and personal dualities are allowed to exist does my life potent an inauthenticity. The re-presentative, the "need", the characterological all pose me through me as instantiation. The original becomes the facsimile, and vice-versa, with an inauthentic power of me acting for and as me.
authenticity 1. noun
State of living beyond non-death.
The state of the union of selves (social, species, personal) facilitated by the self-reflexive factors (creative labor, direct and indirect social interaction) that affect a world that affects me.... That state wherein opposites vector without protective, speculative, extractive, mediation. Given the historical tools of the species, I am allowed to decide for me as me - and thus to really affect others and myself.
authority, authoritarian, authoritarianism
1. 2.
avant garde
1. 2.
---
A
ABASEMENT, n. A decent and customary mental attitude in the presence of wealth or power. Peculiarly appropriate in an employee when addressing an employer.
ABATIS, n. Rubbish in front of a fort, to prevent the rubbish outside from molesting the rubbish inside.
ABDICATION, n. An act whereby a sovereign attests his sense of the high temperature of the throne.
Poor Isabella's Dead, whose abdication Set all tongues wagging in the Spanish nation. For that performance 'twere unfair to scold her: She wisely left a throne too hot to hold her. To History she'll be no royal riddle-- Merely a plain parched pea that jumped the griddle.
G.J.
ABDOMEN, n. The temple of the god Stomach, in whose worship, with
sacrificial rights, all true men engage. From women this ancient
faith commands but a stammering assent. They sometimes minister at
the altar in a half-hearted and ineffective way, but true reverence
for the one deity that men really adore they know not. If woman had a
free hand in the world's marketing the race would become
graminivorous.
ABILITY, n. The natural equipment to accomplish some small part of the meaner ambitions distinguishing able men from dead ones. In the last analysis ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity. Perhaps, however, this impressive quality is rightly appraised; it is no easy task to be solemn.
ABNORMAL, adj. Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested. Wherefore the lexicographer adviseth a striving toward the straiter [sic] resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself. Whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and the hope of Hell.
ABORIGINIES, n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.
ABRACADABRA.
By _Abracadabra_ we signify
An infinite number of things.
'Tis the answer to What? and How? and Why?
And Whence? and Whither?--a word whereby
The Truth (with the comfort it brings)
Is open to all who grope in night,
Crying for Wisdom's holy light.
Whether the word is a verb or a noun
Is knowledge beyond my reach.
I only know that 'tis handed down.
From sage to sage,
From age to age--
An immortal part of speech!
Of an ancient man the tale is told
That he lived to be ten centuries old,
In a cave on a mountain side.
(True, he finally died.)
The fame of his wisdom filled the land,
For his head was bald, and you'll understand
His beard was long and white
And his eyes uncommonly bright.
Philosophers gathered from far and near
To sit at his feet and hear and hear,
Though he never was heard
To utter a word
But "_Abracadabra, abracadab_,
_Abracada, abracad_,
_Abraca, abrac, abra, ab!_"
'Twas all he had,
'Twas all they wanted to hear, and each
Made copious notes of the mystical speech,
Which they published next--
A trickle of text
In the meadow of commentary.
Mighty big books were these,
In a number, as leaves of trees;
In learning, remarkably--very!
He's dead,
As I said,
And the books of the sages have perished,
But his wisdom is sacredly cherished.
In _Abracadabra_ it solemnly rings,
Like an ancient bell that forever swings.
O, I love to hear
That word make clear
Humanity's General Sense of Things.
Jamrach Holobom
ABRIDGE, v.t. To shorten.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to abridge their king, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Oliver Cromwell
ABRUPT, adj. Sudden, without ceremony, like the arrival of a cannon-
shot and the departure of the soldier whose interests are most
affected by it. Dr. Samuel Johnson beautifully said of another
author's ideas that they were "concatenated without abruption."
ABSCOND, v.i. To "move in a mysterious way," commonly with the property of another.
Spring beckons! All things to the call respond; The trees are leaving and cashiers abscond.
Phela Orm
ABSENT, adj. Peculiarly exposed to the tooth of detraction; vilifed;
hopelessly in the wrong; superseded in the consideration and affection
of another.
To men a man is but a mind. Who cares What face he carries or what form he wears? But woman's body is the woman. O, Stay thou, my sweetheart, and do never go, But heed the warning words the sage hath said: A woman absent is a woman dead.
Jogo Tyree
ABSENTEE, n. A person with an income who has had the forethought to
remove himself from the sphere of exaction.
ABSOLUTE, adj. Independent, irresponsible. An absolute monarchy is one in which the sovereign does as he pleases so long as he pleases the assassins. Not many absolute monarchies are left, most of them having been replaced by limited monarchies, where the sovereign's power for evil (and for good) is greatly curtailed, and by republics, which are governed by chance.
ABSTAINER, n. 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.
Said a man to a crapulent youth: "I thought
You a total abstainer, my son."
"So I am, so I am," said the scapegrace caught--
"But not, sir, a bigoted one."
G.J.
ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with
one's own opinion.
ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.
ACADEMY, n. [from ACADEME] A modern school where football is taught.
ACCIDENT, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.
ACCOMPLICE, n. One associated with another in a crime, having guilty knowledge and complicity, as an attorney who defends a criminal, knowing him guilty. This view of the attorney's position in the matter has not hitherto commanded the assent of attorneys, no one having offered them a fee for assenting.
ACCORD, n. Harmony.
ACCORDION, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.
ACCOUNTABILITY, n. The mother of caution.
"My accountability, bear in mind,"
Said the Grand Vizier: "Yes, yes,"
Said the Shah: "I do--'tis the only kind
Of ability you possess."
Joram Tate
ACCUSE, v.t. To affirm another's guilt or unworth; most commonly as a
justification of ourselves for having wronged him.
ACEPHALOUS, adj. In the surprising condition of the Crusader who absently pulled at his forelock some hours after a Saracen scimitar had, unconsciously to him, passed through his neck, as related by de Joinville.
ACHIEVEMENT, n. The death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.
ACKNOWLEDGE, v.t. To confess. Acknowledgement of one another's faults is the highest duty imposed by our love of truth.
ACQUAINTANCE, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous.
ACTUALLY, adv. Perhaps; possibly.
ADAGE, n. Boned wisdom for weak teeth.
ADAMANT, n. A mineral frequently found beneath a corset. Soluble in solicitate of gold.
ADDER, n. A species of snake. So called from its habit of adding funeral outlays to the other expenses of living.
ADHERENT, n. A follower who has not yet obtained all that he expects to get.
ADMINISTRATION, n. An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president. A man of straw, proof against bad-egging and dead-catting.
ADMIRAL, n. That part of a war-ship which does the talking while the figure-head does the thinking.
ADMIRATION, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
ADMONITION, n. Gentle reproof, as with a meat-axe. Friendly warning.
Consigned by way of admonition, His soul forever to perdition.
Judibras
ADORE, v.t. To venerate expectantly.
ADVICE, n. The smallest current coin.
"The man was in such deep distress," Said Tom, "that I could do no less Than give him good advice." Said Jim: "If less could have been done for him I know you well enough, my son, To know that's what you would have done."
Jebel Jocordy
AFFIANCED, pp. Fitted with an ankle-ring for the ball-and-chain.
AFFLICTION, n. An acclimatizing process preparing the soul for another and bitter world.
AFRICAN, n. A nigger that votes our way.
AGE, n. That period of life in which we compound for the vices that we still cherish by reviling those that we have no longer the enterprise to commit.
AGITATOR, n. A statesman who shakes the fruit trees of his neighbors --to dislodge the worms.
AIM, n. The task we set our wishes to.
"Cheer up! Have you no aim in life?"
She tenderly inquired.
"An aim? Well, no, I haven't, wife;
The fact is--I have fired."
G.J.
AIR, n. A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for
the fattening of the poor.
ALDERMAN, n. An ingenious criminal who covers his secret thieving with a pretence of open marauding.
ALIEN, n. An American sovereign in his probationary state.
ALLAH, n. The Mahometan Supreme Being, as distinguished from the Christian, Jewish, and so forth.
Allah's good laws I faithfully have kept,
And ever for the sins of man have wept;
And sometimes kneeling in the temple I
Have reverently crossed my hands and slept.
Junker Barlow
ALLEGIANCE, n.
This thing Allegiance, as I suppose, Is a ring fitted in the subject's nose, Whereby that organ is kept rightly pointed To smell the sweetness of the Lord's anointed.
G.J.
ALLIANCE, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who
have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they
cannot separately plunder a third.
ALLIGATOR, n. The crocodile of America, superior in every detail to the crocodile of the effete monarchies of the Old World. Herodotus says the Indus is, with one exception, the only river that produces crocodiles, but they appear to have gone West and grown up with the other rivers. From the notches on his back the alligator is called a sawrian.
ALONE, adj. In bad company.
In contact, lo! the flint and steel, By spark and flame, the thought reveal That he the metal, she the stone, Had cherished secretly alone.
Booley Fito
ALTAR, n. The place whereupon the priest formerly raveled out the
small intestine of the sacrificial victim for purposes of divination
and cooked its flesh for the gods. The word is now seldom used,
except with reference to the sacrifice of their liberty and peace by a
male and a female tool.
They stood before the altar and supplied The fire themselves in which their fat was fried. In vain the sacrifice!--no god will claim An offering burnt with an unholy flame.
M.P. Nopput
AMBIDEXTROUS, adj. Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket
or a left.
AMBITION, n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.
ANOINT, v.t. To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
As sovereigns are anointed by the priesthood, So pigs to lead the populace are greased good.
Judibras
ANTIPATHY, n. The sentiment inspired by one's friend's friend.
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
APOLOGIZE, v.i. To lay the foundation for a future offence.
APOSTATE, n. A leech who, having penetrated the shell of a turtle only to find that the creature has long been dead, deems it expedient to form a new attachment to a fresh turtle.
APOTHECARY, n. The physician's accomplice, undertaker's benefactor and grave worm's provider.
When Jove sent blessings to all men that are, And Mercury conveyed them in a jar, That friend of tricksters introduced by stealth Disease for the apothecary's health, Whose gratitude impelled him to proclaim: "My deadliest drug shall bear my patron's name!"
G.J.
APPEAL, v.t. In law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.
APPETITE, n. An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labor question.
APPLAUSE, n. The echo of a platitude.
APRIL FOOL, n. The March fool with another month added to his folly.
ARCHBISHOP, n. An ecclesiastical dignitary one point holier than a bishop.
If I were a jolly archbishop, On Fridays I'd eat all the fish up-- Salmon and flounders and smelts; On other days everything else.
Jodo Rem
ARCHITECT, n. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft
of your money.
ARDOR, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
ARENA, n. In politics, an imaginary rat-pit in which the statesman wrestles with his record.
ARISTOCRACY, n. Government by the best men. (In this sense the word is obsolete; so is that kind of government.) Fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts--guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.
ARMOR, n. The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.
ARRAYED, pp. Drawn up and given an orderly disposition, as a rioter hanged to a lamppost.
ARREST, v.t. Formally to detain one accused of unusualness.
God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.
_The Unauthorized Version_
ARSENIC, n. A kind of cosmetic greatly affected by the ladies, whom
it greatly affects in turn.
"Eat arsenic? Yes, all you get,"
Consenting, he did speak up;
"'Tis better you should eat it, pet,
Than put it in my teacup."
Joel Huck
ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related as
follows by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.
One day a wag--what would the wretch be at?-- Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT, And said it was a god's name! Straight arose Fantastic priests and postulants (with shows, And mysteries, and mummeries, and hymns, And disputations dire that lamed their limbs) To serve his temple and maintain the fires, Expound the law, manipulate the wires. Amazed, the populace that rites attend, Believe whate'er they cannot comprehend, And, inly edified to learn that two Half-hairs joined so and so (as Art can do) Have sweeter values and a grace more fit Than Nature's hairs that never have been split, Bring cates and wines for sacrificial feasts, And sell their garments to support the priests.
ARTLESSNESS, n. A certain engaging quality to which women attain by long study and severe practice upon the admiring male, who is pleased to fancy it resembles the candid simplicity of his young.
ASPERSE, v.t. Maliciously to ascribe to another vicious actions which one has not had the temptation and opportunity to commit.
ASS, n. A public singer with a good voice but no ear. In Virginia City, Nevada, he is called the Washoe Canary, in Dakota, the Senator, and everywhere the Donkey. The animal is widely and variously celebrated in the literature, art and religion of every age and country; no other so engages and fires the human imagination as this noble vertebrate. Indeed, it is doubted by some (Ramasilus, _lib. II., De Clem._, and C. Stantatus, _De Temperamente_) if it is not a god; and as such we know it was worshiped by the Etruscans, and, if we may believe Macrobious, by the Cupasians also. Of the only two animals admitted into the Mahometan Paradise along with the souls of men, the ass that carried Balaam is one, the dog of the Seven Sleepers the other. This is no small distinction. From what has been written about this beast might be compiled a library of great splendor and magnitude, rivalling that of the Shakespearean cult, and that which clusters about the Bible. It may be said, generally, that all literature is more or less Asinine.
"Hail, holy Ass!" the quiring angels sing; "Priest of Unreason, and of Discords King!" Great co-Creator, let Thy glory shine: God made all else, the Mule, the Mule is thine!"
G.J.
AUCTIONEER, n. The man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked
a pocket with his tongue.
AUSTRALIA, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.
AVERNUS, n. The lake by which the ancients entered the infernal regions. The fact that access to the infernal regions was obtained by a lake is believed by the learned Marcus Ansello Scrutator to have suggested the Christian rite of baptism by immersion. This, however, has been shown by Lactantius to be an error.
_Facilis descensus Averni,_
The poet remarks; and the sense
Of it is that when down-hill I turn I
Will get more of punches than pence.
Jehal Dai Lupe