Distress: A disease incurred by exposure to the prosperity of a friend.
OBLIVION, n. Cold storage for high hopes. A place where ambitious authors meet their works without pride and their betters without envy. A dormitory without an alarm clock.
KISS, n. A word invented by the poets as a rhyme for "bliss." It is supposed to signify, in a general way, some kind of rite or ceremony appertaining to a good understanding; but the manner of its performance is unknown to this lexicographer.
PALMISTRY, n. The 947th method . . . of obtaining money by false pretences [by] "reading character" in the wrinkles [of] the hand. The pretence is not altogether false. . . for the wrinkles in every hand submitted plainly spell the word "dupe."
INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
REBEL, n. A proponent of a new misrule who has failed to establish it.
COMPULSION, n. The eloquence of power.
We must stop chasing dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring art, literature, and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of civilization.
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.
REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.
Think twice before you speak to a friend in need
Male, A member of the unconsidered or negligible gender. The male of the human race is commonly known to the female as Mere Man. The Genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue.
PHONOGRAPH, n. An irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.
REFUSAL, n. Denial of something desired; Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by some casuists the refusal assentive.
Honorable, adj.: Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach. In legislative bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as, "the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur.".
Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
ROSTRUM, n. In Latin, the beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, virtue and power of the rabble.
Least said is soon disavowed.
TAKE, v.t. To acquire, frequently by force but preferably by stealth.
Cribbage, n. A substitute for conversation among those to whom nature has denied ideas.
POSITIVISM- A philosophy that denies our knowledge of the Real and affirms our ignorance of the Apparent. Its longest exponent is Comte, its broadest Mill and its thickest Spencer.
Platitude: All that is mortal of a departed truth.
MESMERISM, n. Hypnotism before it wore good clothes, kept a carriage and asked Incredulity to dinner.
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