Part 1 (1/2)

The Roycroft Dictionary.

by Elbert Hubbard.

ABEL: The first squealer.

ABHORRENCE: 1. A p.r.o.nounced feeling of dislike in the presence of what is superior or unattainable. 2. To discover one's real self and to slander somebody or something else in revenge. 3. A form of hate that suffers from _mal de mer_.

ASBESTOS: 1. The white-hope of the d.a.m.ned. 2. A specially prepared paper upon which _The Philistine_ is printed.

ARSON: To be careless in the use of fire. (General Sherman was at times more or less careless in the use of fire on his March to the Sea.--_Hon.

Henry W. Grady._)

AERONAUT: A person who goes up in order to come down. Hence, a meta physician.

ABNORMAL: To have intelligence, character or genius; to be less stupid than one's neighbor; to be better than the worst; to be one's self. _E.

g._, the writer of these lines.

ABODE: 1. A place where one cleans one's teeth and occasionally sleeps.

2. A long counter with a gutter and a rail at the bottom over which one is served with any liquid in a gla.s.s. 3. Dwelling, fireside (obsolete in this sense). 4. A grave.

ABNEGATION: A plan for securing the thing in the easiest and surest way.

ACADEMIC: 1. Of, or pertaining to, fossils; vegetative; parasitic; the opposite of change, viable, evolution. 2. Relating to a society that promotes the love of the static and the immobile. 3. Apish, parrot-like, phonographic.

ADIEU: A prayer of thanksgiving uttered at parting.

ACQUAINTANCE: Any one we bow to politely at the opera or shake hands with warmly in a barroom, but whom we would kick out of our homes.

Hence, any one who has refused us a loan.

ACT: 1. Thought in motion. 2. An actor who says he gets three thousand a week.

ABYSS: 1. The measureless gulf between literature and the American magazine. 2. The distance between a thinker and an editorial writer.

ARMY: A body of humanitarians that seeks to impress on another body of men the beauty of non-resistance, by exterminating them.

ABORIGINE: 1. A natural, unaffected person; one who has no conscience, who is honest, upright, and always at war. 2. A Deist, a Pantheist, who sees G.o.d in everything and feels His presence everywhere, even in his cannibalistic rites; hence, the first thinker in any country. 3. One who hates civilization and the _Ladies' Hum Journal_. 4. Any one who is mulcted, robbed, murdered, butchered, betrayed, in the name of progress.

ANARCHIST: 1. A Christian dilettante; one who casts a shadow on tomorrow while waiting for the Greek Kalends. 2. A mouther of sublime inanities.

3. One who maps and surveys the air and constructs dainty Utopias with the building-blocks quarried from his unbelievable credulity. 4. In the insane asylum of idealists, a man who imagines himself to be G.o.d. 5. A militant bourgeois who has deserted both Rome and Reason because he can not stand compet.i.tion.

AMERICAN PLAN: A scheme for shortening human life through overeating.

ANANIAS: 1. The first ad-writer. 2. Any person who adapts the truth to his needs. 3. An ancient Saint George who slew the dragon Truth--hence, any popular hero or revealer who displays his grinders.

AGRICULTURIST: One who makes his money in town and blows it in the country.

ANGER: 1. A violent blus.h.i.+ng and scampering up and down of the blood upon hearing the truth about ourselves; an epileptic condition produced by the presentation of a bill that is not yet due, just due, or overdue.