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	       Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

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Absentee, n.:
        A person with an income who has had the forethought to remove
	himself from the sphere of exaction.
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Absurdity, n.:
        A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own
	opinion.
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Acquaintance, n.:
        A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well
	enough to lend to.
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Admiration, n.:
        Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
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Adolescence, n.:
        The stage between puberty and adultery.
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Adult, n.:
        One old enough to know better.
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Alliance, n.:
        In international politics, the union of two thieves who have
	their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot
	separately plunder a third.
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Barometer, n.:
        An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we
	are having.
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Cold, adj.:
        When the politicians walk around with their hands in their own
	pockets.
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Collaboration, n.:
        A literary partnership based on the false assumption that the
	other fellow can spell.
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Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.
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Conversation, n.:
        A vocal competition in which the one who is catching his breath
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Coronation, n.:
        The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and
	visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite
	bomb.
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Corrupt, adj.:
        In politics, holding an office of trust or profit.
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Critic, n.:
        A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries
	to please him.
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Cynic, n.:
        A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not
	as they ought to be.  Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking
	out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
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Cynic, n.:
        One who looks through rose-colored glasses with a jaundiced
	eye.
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Deliberation, n.:
        The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is
	buttered on.
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Die, v.:
        To stop sinning suddenly.
                -- Elbert Hubbard
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Hand, n.:
        A singular instrument worn at the end of a human arm and
	commonly thrust into somebody's pocket.
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Happiness, n.:
        An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of
	another.
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Hatred, n.:
        A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's
	superiority.
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Heaven, n.:
        A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of
their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you
expound your own.
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Ink, n.:
        A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic, and
	water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote
	intellectual crime.
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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.
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Magpie, n.:
        A bird whose theivish disposition suggested to someone that it
	might be taught to talk.	
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Misfortune, n.:
        The kind of fortune that never misses.
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New Year's Eve is the time of year when a man most feels his age, and
	his wife most often reminds him to act it.
                -- Webster's Unafraid Dictionary
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Noncombatant, n.:
        A dead Quaker.
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November, n.:
        The eleventh twelfth of a weariness.
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Once, adv.:
        Enough.
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Real Time, adj.:
        Here and now, as opposed to fake time, which only occurs there
	and then.
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Sweater, n.:
        A garment worn by a child when its mother feels chilly.
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Truthful, adj.:
        Dumb and illiterate.
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Year, n.:
        A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
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There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable,
and praiseworthy ...
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In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last
resort of the scoundrel.  With all due respect to an enlightened but
inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"