Part 2 (1/2)

CONSERVATIVE: One who is opposed to the things he is in favor of.

COMPLIMENT: A sarcastic remark with a flavor of truth or not, as the case may be.

CONSOLE: To stab one in pain with the bare bodkin of pity.

CONTRADICTION: 1. Two lies disputing the roadway. 2. A head-on collision in which two trains of thought telescope each other.

COQUETRY: 1. An eye-shade worn by lubricity. 2. The colored gla.s.ses of The-Thing-Itself. 3. The death-tumbrel that Pa.s.sion builds for its dreams.

CONSCIOUSNESS: A state wherein one becomes aware that he is being robbed, swindled or duped, by either a natural or an artificial law.

Aside from his periods of sleep it may be said that man is always in a state of consciousness when voting, making love, or when succ.u.mbing to any other form of hypnotic suggestion.

CONVERSION: 1. To be suddenly seized by fright before a fiction or a fact. 2. To execute a mental and moral pirouette from one absurdity to a worse one. 3. To exhaust one pleasure and seek redemption in another. 4.

A backslider from your own ideas to those of an inferior.

CO-OPERATION: Doing what I tell you to do, and doing it quick.

COURAGE: 1. A matter of the red corpuscle. 2. A matter of getting used to it. (It is oxygen that makes every attack, and without oxygen in his blood to back him, a man attacks nothing--not even a pie.--From Wilbur Nesbit's book _Bunc as I Have Found It_.)

CREED: A metaphor with ankylosis--a figure of speech frozen stiff with fright.

CURIOSITY: 1. A gulf that swallows G.o.ds, men, creeds, matter, worlds, philosophies. 2. A peephole in the brain through which one sees the pomp and ceremony of the Absurd. 3. A monstrous antenna that feels its way through matter and mind, and founders in the Infinite. 4. At its lowest, the instinct that boosts us up to peep over our neighbor's transom, symboled by a knot-hole.

CRITICS: Men who quarrel over the motive of a book that never had any.

CRIMINAL: One who does by illegal means what all the rest of us do legally.

CROMWELL (OLIVER): The father of Nell Gwynn.

CREDIT: The lifeblood of commerce.

CASTE: A Chinese Wall that deprives you of the society of sensible people.

CAIN: The first progressive.

CREATOR: A man possessing initiative.

DAWN: 1. The beginning of a daily instalment in a serial story that will never end. 2. That mystical hour wherein Dives goes belching into dreamland and Lazarus comes out yawning carrying a dinner-pail.

DEATH: 1. To stop sinning suddenly. 2. To resign one's members.h.i.+p in the Ananias Club. 3. A readjustment of life's forces.

DEBT: 1. A rope to your foot, c.o.c.kleburs in your hair, and a clothespin on your tongue. 2. The devil in disguise.

DEMAGOGUE: One whose highest ambition is to stand on the grave of a great dead industry and boast to an army of unemployed of his b.l.o.o.d.y deeds.

DECALOGUE: 1. The stakes that hold in its place the social circus-tent.

2. A collection of commandments formulated by a person who has broken them all. 3. An incubator in which eaglets are transformed into capons.

4. A fence that confines animals that can not climb or fly. (The most famous Decalogue is known as the Ten Commandments. Whoso has obeyed this Decalogue in toto has died obscure, poor, unsung, unwept, and overlooked by Clio.)

DOGMA: 1. A hard substance which forms in a soft brain; a coprolitic idea; a lie imperiously reiterated and authoritatively injected into the mind of one or more persons who believe they believe what some one else believes. 2. A paying thought or doctrine. 3. A recession into the Divine or Imperial--hence, the father of graft.